Everyone has thoughts about pride flags- be it their own or others. From color coordination to the number of stripes to the symbols, it is very common to see people online argue about one thing or another. That's fine and cool, but that also means that sometimes I see extremely worrying statements, such as referring to the intersex flag as "one of these new flags."

So, for those unaware: the intersex flag, that is the big purple circle on a yellow background, was designed in 2013. (There is also another "official" intersex flag with pink and blue stripes, but I've personally never seen it used in real life.) To put things in context, the orange lesbian flag was designed in 2018. "Lesbians have 50 flag designs and they can't find a consensus as to which one to use" is a meme that was going around during my lifetime. To be clear: I'm not dunking on lesbians when I say this. What I am saying is that I think some people have absolutely no concept of "what is universal and what is fairly recent development." As it stands, the intersex flag is older than the non-binary flag. Just because you didn't know intersex people existed until a few days ago doesn't mean that they only started existing a few days ago.

You can google up the symbolism of the flag yourself- it'll be good for you to actually look something up for once in your life instead of waiting for it to be spoonfed to you by the tiktok algorythm or whatever. My own two cents is that the point of a flag is to be recognizeable; queer identities aren't in an aesthetic contest here, we're trying to have symbols that say "we're here" so people would stop acting like we're mythological unicorns and thus they shouldn't bother taking us into consideration when making laws. I don't care if the intersex flag is ugly or beautiful. It is instantly recognizeable from far away, so as far as I'm concerned, it fulfills its job. I'm also a big fan of the circle, because it's a break from the regular striped flags- which, in a pride parade, is a very visual way to convey "we're here but we're unrelated to sexuality or gender."

Anyways. Respect the flag. Or if you don't want to respect it, at least do some research about it so you can disrespect it in an accurate way, instead of saying "it's a new flag" (it's not) or "it makes the progress flag cluttered" (you don't even know who that circle is meant to represent do you.)