I, an intersex autistic, want to complain about an autistic flag
This time I'm not complaining about using the white infinity symbol of the Métis. I wanna complain about this flag, made in 2021 by Autistic Empire:
This one upsets me as an intersex person. I get that the designers wanted to make a flag that's different from the neurodiversity flag, and that gold is a common choice for autism (Au = Gold).
The problem it's an icon on a solid golden yellow background, and that is Intersex Flag Territory.
For my perisex readers, these are intersex flags. The one on the left was made in 2013 by Morgan Carpenter so you'll hear people refer to it as the Carpenter flag sometimes:
A common technique in deriving flags for "intersex plus X" is to replace the purple ring with another icon in the same colour. Like these! (Note the intersex autism flag.)
So using the flag logic I'm used to for intersex flags, a rainbow infinity on a solid gold background means.... neurodivergent intersex!
I've talked to a few other intersex people who had the same reaction. It's kind of upsetting - intersex is so frequently invisible and sidelined at the queer table. My *emotional* reaction to the Autistic Empire flag has been "really, we intersex people can't have one thing?". (This is an emotional response not necessarily a rational response.)
Also annoying me is how Autistic Empire presents their 2021 flag on their Autistic Pride Day page beside the history that Autistic Pride Day started in 2005, which apparently gives people the idea that the Autistic Empire flag was created in 2005.
Best I can tell, this was the 2005 flag that Aspies for Freedom created. I know it was a rainbow infinity on a white background but I'm not 100% this was their design. (If you know please let me know!)
These oldest ND/autistic flags I can find with clear provenance are from 2013 and 2016:
The Autistic Empire design was created in 2021 by taking a 2016 neurodiversity infinity symbol design and sticking it on the gold background.
The prospect of solid gold backgrounds taking off as an autistic flag theme is scary to me. I've seen how queer Métis now have to explain that the Métis queer pride flag is not an autistic flag.
In my eyes, it fits into the greater trend of autistic flags being insensitive of other minorities' flags (see: the Metis flag). I think we as a community need to do better about this.
My fellow autistics I beg of you when doing flag designs:
- google image search - has your idea already been used? Search the keywords you want before making a mock up
- also text search on google and tumblr: <keywords> and <flag>
- consult recommendations on how make an infinity symbol that does not look Metis
- Wikipedia's list of flags by colour combination
- once you have a mockup, return to google image search and this time search using the mockup
- if you get feedback that your flag design is too similar to another group's flag, use this feedback. The person who is giving you the feedback might be upset, and if so, try to look past their tone and work past any defensiveness you may feel
Edit to add: I'm keeping a list of autistic & ND flags that don't use the Metis infinity nor use a solid gold background here. If you know of more please let me know! <3
In vexillography as in any branch of graphic design, it is generally inadvisable to put clashing colours next to each other. The rule of tincture is a standard that originated in heraldry and continues to impact flag design today. The rule states that no colour should touch any colour other than white or gold, which are called metals and are considered separately from the rest of the rainbow.* To prevent two colours from touching, it is common to place a thin band of white or gold between them. This practice is called fimbriation.
For example, look at this flag. It is a triband of magenta, green, and blue. The three colours clash with each other and the points at which they intersect are confusing and unpleasant.
However, if we put thin stripes of white or gold between them, the problem is eliminated and the flag is much more pleasant to look at.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but one of the best guidelines to make a flag look clean and elegant is to avoid mixing colours.
*Black is also considered a metal in some heraldic traditions. Black is rarely used to fimbriate, but can generally come in contact with lighter colours with no issue.
In general, it’s advisable to put the most important elements of your flag closer to the flagpole, and preferably higher up. This is because this is the part of the flag that’s visible even in low winds, because it can’t fold in on itself. It’s also guaranteed to be visible when the flag is hanging on an indoor pole. Here’s the flag of the United States to illustrate my point:
When hanging from a pole in low wind, the fly end (furthest from the flagpole) folds in on itself and is obscured. If there were any important or complicated elements there, they would be much harder to see. In contrast, the canton and hoist end, closest to the flagpole, are almost completely straight. This wouldn’t quite be the case on a vertical flagpole, but the effect is mostly the same, so long as there’s at least a little bit of wind.
When hung from a stationary pole indoors, the canton is again the most visible part of the flag, as shown here:
Another example is the flag of Palau, shown here:
As a flat image, the flag seems annoyingly off-balance, but when flown, it looks just right. This is because the far end of the flag is flapping around so much that it doesn’t appear to take up as much space, making the circle appear to be perfectly centered. This is probably the simplest and most obvious illustration of this effect.
A review of intersex/intergender flag mashup techniques
I really like it when I can figure out what a new pride flag means just from my knowledge of other flags, and I know I'm not alone on this. For example, here are some flags other people have made that I could immediately figure out were <thing> plus intersex:
So, I've been thinking about how we as intersex flag creators can create hybrid flags in consistent way. I'm most motivated to figure out a recipe for intergender flags: genders that are connected to being intersex.
I assembled a spreadsheet of 66 gender flags, and wrote a Python script to take my csv file, parse it, and use the drawsvg library to draw the different flags in different ways. And then I stared at the results, showed them to friends, and discussed what would be both reliable in terms of producing clear, decent-looking results. (A subset of the results are under the keep reading cut.)
In this post I'm gonna review five mashup techniques that I automated and talk about advantages/disadvantages to each. But first a TLDR: adding yellow border stripes is a simple and reliable way to make an intersex-hybrid flag that is now my favourite (and recommended) way to make a new intergender flag.
For example, here's the interfluid flag (genderfluid in a way that is specifically intersex):
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Method 1: put a ring on it
- advantages: simple to do, simple to understand
- disadvantages: incredibly dependent on how well the ring colour works with background stripes, and the number of stripes. Would very roughly estimate only ~20% look decent.
Here's a subset of the results. Some, like genderfaun, look nice, but most look awkward:
A yellow ring is even worse:
I think the purple ring has a bit of potential, but I think it's not really viable for being used as a consistent, procedural way to make intergenders.
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Method 2: stick a belt on it
- advantages: already used for some existing mashups
- disadvantages: some other genders are doing similar things, like voidpunk, and a white belt has been used by tons of groups for their mashups (e.g. neurogender).
It looks better than the ring alone, but I was still kinda underwhelmed because of how much it depends on the background stripes to not clash. Very roughly I'd say about 40% of the total results look good. Again, here's genderfae through paragender for comparison:
Using a purple belt helps in some cases but makes for some visually busy results:
The purple ones make me think of pokéballs. Again, there are some nice looking ones, but the effect over the whole group was underwhelming.
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Method 3: inset into the ring
- advantages: it's the most clearly "intersex plus X"
- disadvantages: hard to read flags where the stripes are similar to each other; might clash with ring colour
When zoomed out like this the results aren't always super easy to read, but overall I'd say this is a reasonably reliably method - very roughly 60% of the results look good to me.
Playing with lightness and contrast on the inset flag likely would improve that number, but my goal here is to compare methods without tweaks.
Insetting into the intergender flag has similar results:
Method 4: add intersex-coloured stripe to the middle
- advantage: seems like it would be simple
- disadvantage: yellow middle stripe used for pansexual mashups; purple stripe is used in a bunch of of existing mashups
- also disadvantage: turns out to actually be complicated in how to do it. Many flags have an odd number of stripes, not all flags have equal-length stripes, etc. I got buggy results on a whole bunch of flags like hijra and hypergirl and honestly if it takes dedicated debugging to fix it's probably too complicated.
When the original flag has an odd number of stripes, I doubled the original middle stripe up and this only works if there's a symmetry to the flag and all the stripes are of equal size.
The results are kinda busy. It looks good to my eyes very roughly 1/8 of the time (~12%) (I did an alternate version where I doubled the purple stripe around the original middle stripe and it's way worse.)
Purple stripe:
Yellow stripe looks less busy but more confusing:
Method 5: add border stripes with intersex colours
- advantages: simple
- disadvantages: maybe not as obviously intersex
I honestly didn't expect to like this one, but it has turned out to be my favourite. It works really reliably, like ~90% of the time, and it's distinctive.
Surprisingly, using purple gives a really different vibe. It kinda makes me feel claustraphobic:
Method 6: change the colours
This one I don't have automated results to share (at least not yet). Right now there are flags like how ultergender recolours the trans flag, that could serve as a template for recolouring.
This is much more complex computationally - I spent a bunch of time playing around with different colourspaces (HSV, LCH, oklab, okLCH) to try to do this automatically and have concluded that this actually a difficult computational problem and not feasible as a widescale recipe.
Part of why the ultergender recolouring works is there are just two colours to recolour. How should one recolour the genderfluid flag? The demigender flag? It's possible to create a convention but not something I'm up to this moment.
I think recolouring is better suited to creating entirely new identities (like ultergender) rather than intergenders that are "<gender> but in an intergender way".
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Discussion
My goal in all of this has been to try and identify some reliable recipes for creating hybrid flags particularly for intergenders.
My entirely subjective and imprecise estimates of how reliably each method yielded a decent-looking result were:
1. Add yellow border: ~90%-ish
2. Inset: ~60%
3. Belt: ~40%
4. Ring: ~20%
5. Add middle stripe: ~1/8-ish
I was honestly surprised at how much I liked the yellow border method and the friends I've shown it to so far have liked it as well!
I'd like to propose adding yellow border stripes as a recipe for creating intergender flags. This is already in use for interfluid (genderfluid in a specifically/uniquely intersex way):
Indeed, it's the only one of the mashup functions I wrote that yields something for genderfluid that I actually like:
Extrapolating, here are examples of some gender coinings that I think would work:
Interdemigender: demigender in a specifically/uniquely intersex way and/or demigender in a way linked to being intersex/intergender
Intervaguegender: vaguegender in a way that is specifically intersex, such as in a way that is connected to being intersex (i.e. one's gender is vague not just for being neurodivergent but also intersex)
I think it works well! I hope you like it! Let me know if you have any feedback. If there are other mashup techniques I didn't think of, let me know. :)
If you want to put an animal on your flag, make sure it’s facing the flagpole. This ensures that the front/head of the animal is visible even in low wind conditions (see tip #1). It also makes it look like the animal is walking into the wind. If someone walks or marches with the flag, eg through a parade, an animal facing the flagpole will appear to be moving forward. Historically, animals also faced this way because when flags were carried into battle, an animal facing away from the flagpole appears to be running away instead of leading the charge.
This applies not just to animals, but to any element that is supposed to be facing “forward”—eg people, weapons, etc.
