There’s another Plume ad going around about informed consent and while I’m not going to get into Plume’s issues seeing as I don’t know much about it (And there are plenty of others who can explain it so much better than I could with my rough knowledge.), but it seems they make use of the alternative Intersex flag by Natalie Phox in this ad and I wanted to make this post to note this:
A) No, this is indeed not an alternate trans flag. B) Please, please, please, do not refer to this flag as “ugly” or “fucked up,” it’s incredibly discomforting.
As an Intersex individual, this is incredibly discomforting and upsetting to be seeing other LGBT+ individuals referring to one of our flags like this. Intersex folks do not receive much representation (Not that it seems Plume was even trying to do this, it seems to be a misuse of it in place of the typical trans flag in this scenario, as they do not mention Intersex individuals at all in this ad.) We primarily have two flags that represent us best, that being the one created by Morgan Carpenter in 2013 of the Intersex Human Rights Australia organization (The one you most commonly see, the yellow flag with the purple circle.) and the one created by Natalie Phox in 2009 that is purple, white, and has a stripe in the center that has pink and blue (Typically fading together, representing the overlap.)
Calling our oldest flag and representation of our pride “ass” and “fucked up” is very harmful. It’s hard for us to be represented as is, but seeing Phox’s flag being described like this is extremely upsetting, and I hope people can see why. Seeing other LGBT+ folks talk about our flag in such a derogatory way is absolutely saddening to me.
