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Emoji might not be 66 million years old, but they are pretty much everywhere. Join Ben and Amory as they explore the history of dinosaur emojiin LGBTQ+ communities and their more recent use as an online dog-whistle for anti-trans activists. What happens when one symbol is used for conflicting reasons? And can the dinosaur emoji avoid redefinition or extinction?

Thanks to Dane Grey for this week's artwork. You can find more of their work on InstagramorRedbubble.

Episode producers: Dean Russell and Ben Brock Johnson

Co-hosts: Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson

Web producer: Rachel Carlson

Show producers: Dean Russell, Nora Saks, Kristin Torres and Quincy Walters

Editor: Maureen McMurray

Mixer, sound designer and music creator: Matt Reed

Additional production: Nora Saks, Kristin Torres, Quincy Walters, and Rachel Carlson

Show notes

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This content was originally created for audio. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Ben Brock Johnson: All right, so Amory, can you read this incredible piece of literature?

Amory Siverston: We've got a telephone little dude making some kind of expression with his mouth open, but I can't really see what the eyes are doing. Got a sailboat, little whale. And...

Ben: Just just for the record, just for the record, I'm not asking you to literally repeat the emoji. I'm asking you to read this. Because it is an incredible piece of literature.

Amory: Well, the first line of it looks like Moby Dick.

Ben: Hmmm! How would you translate it?

Amory: First line says, got a bad phone call, I got to get on a boat and go see about a whale.

Ben: So this is what you are looking at right now, Amory, is an excerpt of a translation, an emoji translation of the Herman Melville classic Moby Dick or The Whale.

Amory: Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ben: And it's called Emoji Dick.

Amory: (Laughs.)

Ben: This was admittedly years ago. And the book was translated by people all over the world. And whats interesting here is that they actually translated some of the same words differently in emoji. Like Queequeg or the whale or the sea. And you know what this is like. Like, so do you know the hot and sweaty, red-faced emoji with its tongue out?

Ben: What does that one mean to you?

Amory: That, to me, is it's a it's a hot day and you're cleaning out the garage and you're like, Oh, this sucks, I'm so hot and I hate this so much.

Ben: I'm pretty sure that's not how the kids use it.

Amory: Oh no.

Ben: I think the kids used that emoji as in like this makes me horny.

Amory: What?! It's not the way we did it in my day.

Ben: So I want us to explore this. This specific thing that is happening with this specific set of emoji that's really become this heated debate involving who gets to own the meaning of symbols, specifically the symbols that we all use to make meaning on our phones.

Ben: And the specific emoji that I want to talk about today, Amory, is not the eggplant emoji. Not the hot and bothered emoji, or cleaning out your garage.

But I want to talk about the T. rex and brachiosaurus emoji.

Amory: Im Amory Sivertson.

Ben: Im Ben Brachiosaurus Johnson. And from WBUR, Bostons NPR Station youre listening to Endless Thread.

Amory: 2022 BABY!

Ben: And were gonna start with this one: The saga of those innocent little dinosaur emoji that ended up getting used for something not so innocent.

Amory: And what the tug-of-war over the meaning of these dinos the tiny-armed green tyrannosaurus and their goose-necked sidekick and prey, the blue brachiosaurus or brontosaurus or apatosaurus ... WHAT the meaning of these dinos tells us about how we use symbols.

Ben: So, to understand this dinosaur emoji story, we thought we should start with a little dinosaur knowledge. So, Amory. Join me on this chopper to Isla Nublar?

Amory: (Sings.)

Ben: (Sings).

Amory: When did you first become interested in dinosaurs?

Ben: Was it the Cretaceous or?

Riley Black: I'm 38, so going backwards that would be... (LAUGHS)

Amory: This is Riley Black.

Riley: I'm a science journalist and author. I've written books like Skeleton Keys and The Last Days of the Dinosaurs.

Ben: Riley LOVES her some dinos.

Riley: Big and loud, for whatever reason, was my jam.

Amory: Like when she was five and visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Her first encounter.

Riley: at the time, it was very dark and it was dim, very moody. And just seeing these skeletons that were so much bigger than I was, you know, seeing them in that kind of ghostly light and thinking about what did they look like, what did they sound like, what did they eat? I remember being very struck, standing in the shadow of a brontosaurus skeleton. Like, what did it sound when it breathed that sound of just like life coming out of this animal out of these old bones?

Ben: Now, she digs for fossils professionally. She writes about it and tweets about it. Online, she exists in multiple worlds. And multiple dinosaur communities.

Riley: A lot of it is very professionalized people talking about their new papers and new studies coming out in their latest field expedition. There's also a broader community of dinosaur and paleontology enthusiasts, people who just like to know more, or they were inspired by Jurassic Park, and they want to find out the real stories behind these animals. And the number of paleo-artists on social media right now is astounding...

Amory: If you look through some of this paleo art, it is astounding. Some of these things look real. A feathered sinosauropteryx, which kind of looks like a lemur-duck hybrid and it kinda looks like it was caught on camera.

But within this group of dinosaur artists and enthusiasts or, overlapping with this group theres another subset of people.

Riley: Many people who are queer, whether they are trans or some other form of genderqueer or whatever it is...We love dinosaurs.

Ben: Along with being a dinosaur expert, Riley is, herself, transgender. And according to Riley, there is a whole community of genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts online. We had no idea. So we checked it out. Sure enough, theyre there. We found dozens of paleoartists online that identify as queer.

Amory: Type "dinosaur" into the LGBT subreddit. Hundreds of results, with pride dinos, rainbow dinos, dino moms, dino dads, and a LOT of puns. Like, Ally-saurus.

Ben: Trans-ceratops.

Amory: In 2018, the Twitter account for SUE the T. rex one of the worlds most famous dinosaurs, held at the Field Museum in Chicago that account updated SUEs bio to include the dinosaurs pronouns: they/them.

Ben: Whats the connection between people who identify as genderqueer and dinosaurs?

Riley: I am not entirely sure why this is an aspect of social psychology. I think that has not been plumbed as yet.

Ben: Social psychologists, please get plumbing. Because were not sure why either. Dinosaurs have been around for a whilejust like the LGBTQ community.

Amory: And, if you remember your elementary school science class or Jurassic Park youll recall that dinosaurs are all around. Because birds are dinosaurs. And Riley says that fact may be part of the draw for transgender people.

Riley: And I think that aspect of falling into more than one category at once and some of these threads of sort of transformation through time are just naturally appealing to people like me and other people in the trans community.

Ben: This community might not be gigantic. But it is strong and undeniably present. And along with art and expressions of pride, you will definitely see dino emoji.

Ben: Were you using the dinosaur emoji relatively frequently before all of this stuff happened?

Riley: Yeah, I mean, I would use dinosaur emojis for emphasis just to share things I was excited about, especially when paired with other emojis like I have a book that's coming out in April about the extinction of the dinosaurs that occurred 66 million years ago. Whenever I talk about it, I use a little dinosaur emoji, a comet emoji, a plant emoji and a raccoon emoji to kind of tell that story of like the dinosaurs going extinct and plants and mammals coming back afterwards and just having fun like with storytelling.

Amory: But a few months ago, Riley started to see dinosaur emoji that werent so fun.

Riley: I think my initial knee-jerk reaction, um, was just like, Well, you can't have them. Like dinosaurs are ours.

Ben: The T. Rex and brachiosaurus were showing up in the profiles of a different online community. Kind of as a badge. A dog whistle to say to others within that community: Im one of you.

Riley: It really just made zero sense to me whatsoever in terms of like, you know, they could have picked anything else and it might have made a little bit more sense to me.

Amory: Riley refers to the group of co-opters as TERFs, as in T-E-R-F. Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, who call themselves gender critical. In other words, anti-trans.

Broadly speaking, TERFs promote the idea that trans women are really menthat, unlike cisgender women, trans women have benefited from being a part of the patriarchy and thus are a threat to cis women. Above all, they say that, unlike sex, gender identity is an ideology and is not grounded in science. Well come back to this.

Ben: You may recall the most famous or infamous person associated with TERF ideology is J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author. Among other things, in 2020, she published a 3700-word essay defending her belief that the term woman as a political and biological class was being eroded by people who refer to trans women as women.

Anyway, TERFs using dinosaur emoji was a problem for Riley.

Riley: To see, you know, our social enemies for lack of a better term taking, you know, these symbols and trying to use it as their dog whistle, it was something where it's just like, Where's this even coming from? This makes zero sense. And also dinosaurs are ours. I hate to speak for the entire trans or genderqueer community but, like, no. Weve already been wondering about them and drawing them and interested.

Amory: No matter who you are, if you see something beloved taken over by someone else, that can be hard. Suddenly, genderqueer fans of dinos everywhere felt under attack as TERFs kept dropping the emoji into their feeds.

Ben: And we know how these things go. Just think of Pepe the frog. Or the Punisher skull. Or the swastika. When outsider groups latch onto a symbol, that symbol is often changed. Irrevocably.

But emoji rex and brachiosaurus? Its more complicated. Because Riley and others refused to let go.

More on that in 66 millionmicroseconds.

[SPONSOR BREAK]

Ben: Its not clear if TERFs knew they were co-opting something beloved to this slice of the genderqueer community. As far as we can tell, dinosaur emoji began showing up in anti-trans Twitter bios around October of last year.

And the catalyst may have been the UKs Parliament which reminds one of Muppets in more ways than one.

David Lammy: Denied their rights in this country under her watch. (Hearrr.)

Lammy: Once enslaved, then colonized, then repatriated. (Hearrr.)

Lammy: When will Black lives matter once again? (Hearrrrr.)

Amory: David Lammy is a liberal MP. Hes also a shadow secretary. His job is to criticize the conservative government. To stir up controversy, in a way. Hes good at it.

Ben: And back in September, Lammy was asked in a meeting about transgender rights. So, he responded calling out his colleagues on the right and in his own party for being anti-trans. He called them dinosaurs. As in, behind the times.

Amory: This was not big news. Except on Twitter, where a little pocket of the internet was blowing up. TERFs were offended by the analogy. And then, they embraced it.

Like one person who goes by the handle @LilyLilyMaynard. She started tweeting videos of her fellow TERFs outside the Labour Partys headquarters.

Ben: Theyre dressed in cheap, inflatable dinosaur costumes, singing off-key about genitals, which, were not going to play for obvious reasons. But if you Google Labour Party Head Office, the main image representing the building is of these dinosaurs. It would be comical if it werent in service of one group rejecting anothers identity.

Jeremy Burge: I feel like the first time we really saw the double meaning of the emoji has to be the eggplant.

Amory: There is one guy you have to call if you want to understand emoji.

Jeremy: They felt like an odd choice to put on the emoji keyboard, so people kind of immediately saw that and said, Thats funny. That now means a penis.

Ben: Say hello to Jeremy Burge.

Jeremy: And I'm the founder and chief emoji officer at Emojipedia.

Ben: What does that mean?

Jeremy: That's a good question, what does it mean? Emojipedia describes every emoji, what it looks like, what it looks like on all platforms. And for me, I oversee a small team of people who do exactly that describe how people use emojis and how they evolve over time.

Amory: We asked Jeremy, how common is this? Emoji double-meanings used like a badge

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