Question about flag variation colors
Submitting this since it turned out too long for one ask! Hope y'all don’t mind.
I hope I don’t come off as sounding rude, I’m just curious about commonly used colors for variations of gender/orientations.
What I mean is like, for genders, there’s usually pink/red for girl/woman, light blue/blue for boy/man, green for neutrois, purple for androgyne, yellow for nb, and orange for maverique.
Then for orientation flag variations, there’s green for aromantic spectrum, purple for asexual spectrum, red for sexual spectrum*, pink for romantic spectrum*, yellow for platonic, yellow and pink for quasiplatonic, orange for sensual, and blue for alterous.
* = I’m actually not too sure about th is, I think they were mentione in an ask either on here or somewhere else. Please feel free to correct me on this!
So I was just wondering, are there other colors commonly used for certain categories of gender or orientation like these? I think it’s neat that besides flags, there’s general colors that are used consistently for variations like this!
Well, there is nothing official of course, the point is that those colors are followed so it’s easier to understand from where they come from.
Pink is a color associated with love in general, which is what I think was the inspiration to make the aro community color be green (the opposite of pink). On the aceflux flag, pink is used to mean sexual attraction, not red, but red is also seen as the color of desire/passion, which are commonly associated to lust, sex, and sexual attraction.
What actually represents lack of attraction on the asexual flag is black, but purple ended up more associated to asexual people, even though the color only represents community on the original flag. Maybe because it pops out more.
Since the main difference between asexual and aromantic flags are the purple and the green, those colors are sometimes used not as signs of lack of attraction, but as signs of what kind of attraction a flag represents. This is why orientations such as malasexual or pomosexual have purple on their flags, while malaromantic and pomoromantic have green, even though those orientations don’t necessarily have to do anything with the ace/aro spectrum.
I don’t know if this is what happened with platonic (yellow), queerplatonic (pink and yellow), alterous (blue) and sensual (orange/peach) colors, though. I mean, I don’t know if they were originally used as colors for lack of attraction but then became associated to their respective orientations, or if they were associated to attraction first and then used on a-spec flags.
Black would be the most adequate color to use to mean lack of attraction, but popularity of the asexual and aromantic flags ended up making people associate purple to lack of sexual attraction and green to lack of romantic attraction;
However, because of how asexual and aromantic communities were the pioneers of the current split attraction model, people may also associate purple to sexual attraction and green to romantic attraction, instead of the respective absences;
Which means, it’s basically up to the interpretation of the flag creators how they want to use its colors.
Pink and red are also good ways to represent the presence of attraction, especially (but not necessarily) romantic and sexual, respectively.
Now, for genders, again, there is room for interpretation. And it’s important to note that there are not only more genders than orientations, there are also more gender identities that are often combined with other gender labels to make specific flags than orientations.
(I mean, you can make a lot of combos, from aro/ace/apl to findemialterous/cupioromantic/panmyrsexual, but it makes more sense to have separate asexual and aromantic or pansexual and myrsexual flags than to have separate demigender and boy flags, for instance. People rarely use demigender on its own, and having a boy pride flag on its own doesn’t make much sense either.)
There are various identities that can be used as “core” gender identities. I’m talking about girl, boy, androgyne, maverique, neutrois, stargender, juxera, proxvir, and anything else that is a “core gender” that can be “modified”, such as in alteboy, demijuxera or librandrogyne, in contrast to identities that are descriptions of other genders, such as genderfluid, bigender or magigender. You can be altebigender or librafluid, but you still have “actual genders (or ‘gender feelings’, in the case of libragender)” there, even if undefinable. Two maveriques or girls have the same gender, but two bigender or nanogender people can have entirely different genders.
With identities such as polygender or genderhoarder, it would be awful and potentially pointless to actually go through every possible combination of genders, and make flags based on each person’s experience. With identities such as magigender or bigender, well, it would also be awful and potentially pointless to make flags for every identity, but not only there are less identities to cover, it’s also more common for magigender and bigender people to talk about what specific gender(s) they have, instead of just saying the less specific term.
Usually, when a term is meant to use as a combination with other term (subgender, demigender, libragender, quivergender, etc.), flags are made for three possibilities: girl, boy, and nonbinary. Sometimes, people go further (see: dodransgender, altegender) - I especially like not having just three because I think it’s unfair to have more binary than nonbinary possibilities, with regards to the “core genders” - but it’s not mandatory to make more than a whatevergender flag, without variations, when making flags.
Flags that commonly have no core gender variations can either account for core genders on their own base flag, or just be on their own. (Of course, core genders will stick to the second one, but other kinds of identities may stick with either one.)
(Sorry for the long introduction, but I think this may be relevant to your interests.)
The ones that account for core genders are usually recognizable by patterns such as pink/blue/yellow/purple, or maybe pink/blue/green/black, red/blue/purple/white or similar variations. The colors are usually meant to be something like this:
Pink (sometimes red, magenta or purple): either binary women, woman-aligned people or femininity;
Blue (usually baby blue, but can be of other shades): either binary men, man-aligned people or masculinity;
Yellow (or green): either nonbinary people in general, or people whose genders don’t have anything to do with the gender binary;
Purple (or lavender, violet, etc.): either the mix of the meanings of whatever pink and blue mean on that particular flag, or nonbinary people in general (when there’s no yellow or green);
Black (or white): lack of gender, or maybe multiplicity of gender.
Sometimes, there’s also gray, which either means partial gender/demigender or confusion/questioning.
It’s important to note that, while those are often the meanings of these colors on other kinds of flags too, those are almost certainly the meanings of those colors on whatever flag has those colors together. See: crystagender, fluidflux, genderfluid, trigender, polygender, genderflux, musicgender.
I think this is rather uncreative; it’s often unnecessary to cover every sort of nonbinary people, and it leads to a lot of flags having similar pride colors.
Here are some flags that avoid that repetition (when they could fall into it), using other symbolism, focusing more on the identity itself: fissgender, verangender, emotugender and genderpositive.
Now, sometimes you have to be more specific than “male, female, in between, genderless and/or other nonbinary people”. But, besides the cultural background of pink girls and blue boys, most colors have no fixed meaning. The colors will probably be chosen from flags, but flags usually have more than one color. Besides, some identities could still overlap. Here are some examples:
Green: can mean neutrois, proxvir, nonbinary man, autigender, ceterogender or genderqueer/nonbinary;
Yellow: can mean nonbinary, ningender, egogender or liberique;
Orange: can mean nonbinary woman, maverique, intensigender or nymhs;
Red: can mean altegender, refligender, juxera, or maybe one of the various culturally exclusive identities that have red on their flags;
Pink: yes, can mean girl, but also any feminine gender, cutegender or genderfae;
Purple: can mean androgyne, genderqueer, gender neutral, femgender, nonbinary, aliagender, ambonec or intergender;
Blue: yes, can mean boy, but also any masculine gender, stargender or welkingender (and most other genders related to the sky, space or water).
Meanings of black and gray not included, since they are mostly consistent with what I said above.
Yeah, maybe most of those examples will never conflict with each other. And it’s always possible to use more colors in order to distinguish between different genders. But my purpose here is pointing out that many of those colors may have different meanings across flags, depending on which flags are made. Compare and contrast:
demiboy, demialia, demiandrogyne, nxnbinary
erotoandrogyne, erotogenderqueer, altequeer; androgyne [x] [x] [x] [x], genderqueer, queer chevrons
femgender, nonvirmina, genderqueer, agender, volitoneutrois
And this is ignoring the possibility of flags expressing anything else but gender. For instance, the maverique flag has white not for lack or multiplicity of gender, but to describe that maverique “comes from a blank slate”, as in, it’s not related to being male, masculine, female, feminine, neutral or without gender. The healegender flag has meanings that have nothing to do with the ones seen here. And so on.
It’s also important to notice that most flags that use boy/girl/nonbinary variations (such as magigender, pixelgender, horogender and quivergender) use yellow to represent nonbinary, even though there are exceptions (vapononbinary uses purple, vocinonbinary, ananonbinary and plerunonbinary use green). And most -gender versions of those flags (those that don’t use a core gender suffix) use green.
Some gender flags are rather predictable, because they use almost the same set of colors to represent a wide variety of “core genders”;
However, when it comes to flags that only represent one “core gender”, meanings may overlap because there are way more “core genders” than easily described color hues;
This can be bypassed by using more than one color, or some sort of discernible variation, but it rarely happens because most people just use girl/boy/nonbinary variations;
There is more to flag colors than genders, so you should be careful when assuming the meanings of certain flags.
I hope this answers your question!
