On Flags
A few days ago, I had to block a terf in the notes of a post, and occasionally I grab dumb terf posts for r/insanepeoplefacebook (which allows tumblr screenshots) so I decided to glance around for some free reddit karma. One of the posts I found was something about flags that was... so stupid. To prove I’m not making up a strawman, heres the post.
The argument here is that the genderqueer and nonbinary flags are appropriated, even if unintentionally. While she doesn’t outright accuse the creators of flag theft, the tone of the post is rather accusatory. Like most terf takes, this is moronic, and I’m gonna
First of all, the GQ flag. I decided to take this terf’s word for it and googled “purple white and green flag”, and I got the suffragette flag on the 5th result. However, I ALSO googled the creator’s response to accusations of theft, and noticed that the terf put something in quotations that was not a direct quote. That may sound like nitpicking, but I feel like putting something in quotation marks when it isn’t a direct quote is dishonest. The actual direct quote reads as follows;
Two points of interest: “first design” and that Marilyn didn’t find the flag. The terf in the post speaks about Marilyn’s design like it was made within minutes and poorly thought out. Upon doing my own research, I found out that Marilyn had started working on this flag in June of 2010. The initial design looked like this, aka nothing like the suffragette flag.
So why was it changed? Well, I can’t answer that for certain. But as an art student, I can see one issue: The letters. My design class had a unit on vexillology, aka flag design. My teacher stressed that one of the cardinal sins of flag design was using lettering on flags. While not all good flags strictly adhere to common flag design principles (the Welsh flag violates the “simple enough for a child to draw” rule and it fuckin rocks), maybe Marilyn, who was working towards a Digital Arts degree at the time they were designing the flag, might have wanted to simplify it. The second design for the flag looks like the final version with the white and green reversed.
Okay, so clearly the terf either didn’t do enough research for the post where she accused someone else for not doing enough research, as Marilyn’s response is easy to find here on tumblr, or she wanted to make a petty jab at a trans person’s design skills. But how come Marilyn couldn’t find the suffragette flag when I found it in seconds? Well, Marilyn was researching this in 2010-2011. While google doesn’t let you put custom ranges on images specifically, the general results can be searched by a custom time range. So I checked everything from January 1st,1908 to May 31st, 2010. Here is what I found, and no, the suffragette flag was not on the Wikipedia page at all.
The first mention of the suffragette flag doesn’t show up until page 4 of the results. And then I got an idea. I searched for things up until June 1, 2010. Then June 2, 2010. Then June 3rd, and so on. Up until June 10, the results looked the same.
Then on June 11th, the suffragette flag suddenly showed up in the image results, and the page with the image source was bumped up to page three. Google's algorithm tends to show popular pages first. So why was this page suddenly getting enough hits to boost it higher in the results than links from the Wall Street Journal, Encyclopedia Britannica, liturgical (Church) calendars, and NASCAR, when the first mention of the suffragette flag prior to this had been at least three results under the aforementioned other pages and the website on the third page was brand new?
Well, I did a bit of digging on the wayback machine and found that Roxie posted the first design for the genderqueer pride flag on June 7th. After this point, Marilyn was likely no longer researching colors as they’d already been decided, and was taking suggestions for the flag up until the final design was uploaded in June 2011. The first time anybody actually decided to point out the similarity to Marilyn was in February 2012. My searches found that the flag had been mostly forgotten until June 2010. Now, maybe in the UK it was still a major symbol in 2010. However, google results differ based on your location. Marilyn and I both live in the US, so it’s not that surprising it took us longer to find results mentioning the suffragette flag. Even when I searched the same dates with a vpn changing my location to the UK though, there was no image result until the 10th and the first site talking about it was on the second page. Until the original genderqueer flag was posted, nobody seemed to care about the old suffragette flag. For fucks sake, it took someone a year to notice the similarity and find it important enough to message Roxie about it. Now for the nonbinary flag. While the terf correctly named Kyle Rowan as the creator of the flag, she neglected to mention that there was a call for someone to create a design for folks who didn’t feel like the genderqueer flag represented them, and several designs were submitted. While the initial call for submissions came from a blog which no longer exists and was never archived, Rowan’s posts on the matter are archived and used as sources on the page for the flag on Nonbinary Wiki, which is the 5th result when you search “where was the nonbinary flag first posted”. This one is even more of a reach. Assuming that Rowan also googled the color combination to avoid using one that was already common, they would have included black in the search. When you search for “yellow white purple black flag”, you will not find anything about suffragette flags. Mostly because the American suffragette flag is gold, white, and purple, without a black stripe. Even the quote the terf used to explain the meanings calls the color on the suffragette flag gold. The nonbinary flag has a yellow stripe. Yellow and gold are different colors.
Rowan was kind enough to provide exact hex codes for the flag on their blog. Obviously Alice Paul had no way to do this, so I eyedropped an image of the flag. Here’s a comparison.
On the left is the gold on Alice Paul’s flag, on the right is the yellow from Kyle Rowan’s. Pretty obvious they aren’t the same, unless you’re colorblind. The suffragette flag also usually has stars, which the nonbinary flag lacks. Also, in the post, the terf mentions that Alice Paul changed the green to gold as a homage to Susan B. Anthony. Anthony was known to exclude Black women from her activism. So that’s a bit of uncomfortable symbolism. Groundbreaking.
Anyway, do the flags look kinda similar? Yeah, I’m not denying that. But why are Roxie and Rowan responsible for flags not being used since the suffrage movement? By 2010, they both faded into relative obscurity. idk this stupid post made me mad so i went digging.
