Twitter is kicking off LGBTQ Pride Month with a tiny but important dose of inclusion. 。
The social network has updated its official Pride Month heart emoji to feature the colors of both the rainbow LGBTQ flag and the transgender flag. The icon, which Twitter calls a "Pridemoji," originally only featured the rainbow flag when it debuted last year.。
SEE ALSO:Instagram releases fierce rainbow stickers to celebrate LGBTQ Pride Month。The new heart will show up in your tweets when you use the hashtags #LoveIsLove, #2017年Pride , #PrideMonth, and #PrideIsHappening. The Pridemoji will also accompany variations of these hashtags in several languages, including Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, French, Russian, and Chinese.。
Credit: Twitter。Though the rainbow flag is used to represent the entire LGBTQ community, including transgender and nonbinary people, many outside the community see the symbol as only representing people with queer sexualities, not gender identities.。
"We updated the rainbow heart. Now half of it is a direct salute to our trans friends, lovers, and family."。
Transgender and nonbinary people have gathered around the blue, pink, and white trans flag to build an accepting, tight-knit community after having their needs and interests largely cast aside by the mainstream LGBTQ rights movement.。
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The choice to include a nod to the trans flag in the updated Pridemoji is an essential move toward the deliberate inclusion of transgender and nonbinary people in Pride Month.。
"Y'all know #LoveIsLove well!" Twitter Open, the company's official LGBTQ group, said in a tweet introducing this year's official Pride Month tags. "But we updated the rainbow heart. Now half of it is a direct salute to our trans friends, lovers, and family." 。
So far, users are loving it.。
So far, users are loving it.。
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Tweet may have been deleted。
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Tweet may have been deleted 。
Tweet may have been deleted。
But, as some users pointed out, the emoji doesn't actually include the color white — a stripe on the trans flag meant to represent nonbinary people, intersex people, and those in the process of transitioning. 。
Twitter explained to users that the exclusion was necessary because of space constraints. 。
Twitter explained to users that the exclusion was necessary because of space constraints.。
Tweet may have been deleted。
Tweet may have been deleted 。
Though the LGBTQ community is largely celebrating the move, queer Twitter users still aren't forgetting the grief Twitter has caused them in the past — from not adequately handling identity-based harassment to incorrectly guessing the gender of trans users based on their profile activity. 。
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