Alright, submitted for your approval.
Here is what I hope will be a definitive trans woman pride flag.
I was really upset by how many different trans woman pride flags have been floating around, a lot of which seemed to not even have been made by trans women. Obviously, the effectiveness of a symbol is directly related to how recognizable it is, so over-saturating the community with flags has definitely hurt trans women’s visibility.
This is of course a necessity, because the oppression that trans women face is distinct from the oppression felt by rest of the trans umbrella identities. We thereby need a symbol to rally around that is itself distinct from the rest of the trans community’s symbol.
Overall the original trans pride flag has a very classic and recognizable look, so I attempted to preserve as much of the original design as possible. The main change from this is the replacement of the soft baby blue, which represents manhood in the original flag, with a thick blunt red.
The pink represents womanhood and femininity.
The white represents the transition itself, along with a distinction from the gender binary.
The red represents the struggle and violence that trans women face both in the process of transition and in everyday life, along with a reminder that we do have a shared history of resistance and activism.
If you like it please feel free to reblog it so that maybe we can finally have a widely recognized symbol of trans female pride. Non trans women feel free to reblog it as well.
So six months ago I created this post and this flag, some of the immediate backlash I received was so visceral and unexpected that I panicked and deleted my blog. Specifically the attention I had garnered from the radical feminist ideologues was so devastating and so disheartening that I fell into a bit of a personal downward spiral. I feel as though our culture has devalued the violences created by these so called trans exterminatory radical feminists, especially because of the statements and inactions of our non trans women allies in their appropriation of our narratives of oppression. ie terf becoming a catch all term for “person I don’t like.”
After this time I have calmed down and shifted my paradigm of activism all the way back around to believing in this symbol again, despite the personal trauma it has brought to me. There is the historical precedent for the necessity for someone to advocate for a symbol, particularly within the so called queer community. Historically, symbols don’t just gain their meaning through simple statements, they gain them through their direct application. This is partially why I was so incensed in the first place when I approached the issue of a unified symbol of the trans female identity. There had been individuals, mostly cafab, who had created trans women pride flags and simply thrown them to the wind, which I postulate is why all of them failed. I wasn’t there to advocate and embody this symbol and this was my greatest failure. But I will do so now.
I’d like to take a brief moment to formally address one of the most common criticisms I received about this design. Specifically, that it closely resembles the design of the lipstick lesbian flag. First of all, no it does not. While relativistic visual similarities are subjective there are several obvious differences between the common lipstick lesbian flag and this proposed trans feminine pride flag. The lipstick flag has seven colors which appear in a gradient, the colors are of a distinctly cooler purple tone, and it is not horizontally mirrored. The trans feminine pride flag features five stripes in three colors, which are obviously of a warmer redder hue. The difference can be seen obviously at a distance and it can be seen obviously in greyscale.
I honestly find it kind of ridiculous that this is an issue seeing as pride flag blogs have been making dozens of widely accepted varieties of lesbian flags for months now, ie sun lesbian, moon lesbian, ocean lesbian, etc. and I have seen very little criticism that these are in anyway diluting the symbol. I don’t take umbrage with these flags, I just see this as a double standard especially when a trans feminine pride flag has an immense necessity. The whole point of pride flags is to exist as a symbol of history and on top of this cis and cafab lesbians have a very prevalent and effective history of violence against trans women, and yet trans lesbians themselves have made great efforts to further the interests of the lesbian community regardless. I in fact find it predictable that a group which has historically gone to great lengths to exclude and demonize transgender women has gone on to attempt to strip trans women of pride at even the hint of parity.
Obviously I am not the entire community, so whether or not this symbol succeeds, the impetus is on the acceptance of my fellow trans women and our allies. I truly believe the shared experience for trans women necessitates a unified symbol of pride and so I will stand by this. Also, I want to make it clear that I don’t want to toot my own horn so to speak. I feel like now it should be obvious that the last thing I want is the public eye. I simply want to be able to feel pride in an identity that has, for me, seeded a lot of grief in my life, and if that means stepping out of my comfort zone then so be it.
pls rb