intervex:

What Pride Flags Mean, Part 1: Gender and Attraction

Welcome to the latest installment of my autistic hyperfixation on flags! I wanted to figure out a common language of Colour X means Thing Y. Like how pink is consistently used for feminine.

Having a common language for flag meanings matters because it improves cognitive accessibility of flags. ♿️💙

But I didn’t want to be prescriptive about what colours should mean what. Just because I think Thing X should go with Colour Y doesn’t mean everybody else would.

So this turned into a descriptive, empirical project. I gathered a data set of 2060 pride flag colour choices to figure out what are the most common colour-meaning combinations. Some of the results:

A circular bar graph showing common colour-meaning associations used in LGBTQIA+ flags to convey different kinds of gender (e.g. feminine, masculine). The angles are the hue in okLCH colour space. The length of each bar is how many entries in my data set had this tag. This one looks rather triangular because there are three long bars equidistant from each other. Pink for feminine is at the top. Blue for masculine is at the lower left. Chartreuse (yellow-green) for gender neutral is at the lower right.. The next largest bars are androgynous (purple) that is exactly in between feminine and masculine, and 180 from neutral. Beside neutral is nonbinary and exobinary, which are yellow, and intersex, which is a more orangey yellow. Intersex is opposite from perisex and nonbinary is opposite from binary, both of which don't have very large bars. Also of note is that queer is a shade more purple than feminine, and xenine is a shade more red than feminine.ALT
A circular bar graph showing common colour-meaning associations used in LGBTQIA+ flags to convey different kinds of attraction (e.g. sexual, romantic, platonic). Like the last graph, the angles are the hue in okLCH colour space. The length of each bar is how many entries in my data set had this tag. This one has a different shape than the gender one! It has one bar that is much bigger than the rest and it is a blue bar titled kinky. Across from it is vanilla, which is a tiny bar because people do not make vanilla pride flags. Other notable entries are how sexual attraction is across from romantic attraction, and alterous and sensual are each 90 degrees from the romantic-sexual axis. Similarly, platonic attraction is 180 across from social attraction, with aesthetic and familiar attraction each being 90 degrees to that axis.ALT

And here are the abstract modifiers: these are modifiers that were generally shared between the genders and the attractions. For example, black is used to indicate having no gender as well as having no attraction.

Another circular bar graph showing common colour-meaning associations used in LGBTQIA+ flags to convey different kinds of attraction (e.g. sexual, romantic, platonic). Once again, the angles are the hue in okLCH colour space. The length of each bar is how many entries in my data set had this tag. This one is more uniformly distributed. The largest tag is none and it's solid black. All is solid white so it is enclosed in a black border to make its shape clear. The next largest bars are fluid (which is purple) and multiple (which is bluish green). Partial is 90 degrees from all and multiple, and one is 180 degrees from partial.ALT

Click here for tables with okLCH values, hex values, definitions, and notes – I’ve put a more detailed write-up on my Wikimedia Commons userpage. (Mediawiki supports sortable tables and Tumblr does not.)

METHODS-AT-A-GLANCE

To make the figures above, I assembled a data set of pride flag colours. It contains 2060 colour choices from 624 pride flags, representing 1587 unique colours. Click here for a detailed description of how I gathered and tagged the pride flag colours and tagged them.

For each tag, I converted every colour to okLCH colour space and computed a median colour. OkLCH colour space is an alternative to RGB/hex and HSL/HSV. Unlike RGB/hex and HSL/HSV, okLCH is a perceptual colour space, meaning that it is actually based on human colour perception. 🌈

In okLCH space, a colour has three values:
– Lightness (0-100%): how light the colour is. 100% is pure white.
– Chroma (0-0.37+): how vibrant the colour is. 0 is monochromatic. 0.37 is currently the most vibrant things can get with current computer monitor technologies. But as computer monitor technologies improve to allow for even more vibrant colours, higher chroma values will be unlocked.
– Hue (0-360°): where on the colour wheel the colour goes – 0° is pink and 180° is teal, and colours are actually 180° opposite from their perceptual complements.

The important thing to know is that okLCH Hue is not the same Hue from HSV/HSL – the values are different! (HSL and HSV are a hot mess and do not align with human colour perception!)

You can learn more about okLCH through my little write up, which was heavily influenced by these helpful articles by Geoff Graham, Lea Verou, and Keith J Grant.

You can play with an okLCH colour picker and converter at oklch.com

🌈

MORE RESULTS: COLOUR DISTRIBUTIONS

Back when I started tagging my data, I divided my data into five main chunks: Gender qualities (e.g. masculine, androgynous), Attraction (e.g. platonic, sexual), Values (e.g. community, joy), Disability (e.g. Deaf, blind), and Other.

I’ll talk about Disability and Values in future posts! But for an alternate view of the data, here are the full distributions of the colours that were placed in each tag.

They come in three parts: tags I created for Gender, tags for Attraction, and tags from Other. The abstract modifiers are spread between the first two, though their contents transcend Gender and Attraction.

This is another data rich graphic. There is a vertical bar chart. On the left is the legend, listing genders like xenine and masculine. To the left of each gender tag is a series of small rectangles of different colours, each representing a different colour choice in a pride flag that got tagged with this tag. The little swatches are sorted in hue so red is on the left and blue is on the right. Once again the largest bars are feminine, masculine, and neutral. We see the first two are pretty consistent - masculine is blue and feminine is pink. But neutral is about half yellow and half green. Intersex is about 2/3 yellow and 1/3 purple. None is about 1/2 black and 1/4 white and 1/4 colours. Partial is about 1/2 greys and 1/2 cool colours. Xenine doesn't have a ton of coherence, with a broad range from blue to yellow. The graph conveys that some of the tags have a lot of internal consistency but some of them like xenine do not. ALT
This has the same structure as the last image, but it is attraction types this time. Aesthetic attraction has the longest bar and it shows a spread of pink, red, and yellow. By comparison, sensual attraction is just all orange. Alterous attraction is also pretty consistent in being blue. Same with platonic and yellow. Sexual attraction is mostly purple, but there are a bunch of reds. ALT
And a third image with the same structure as the last two. These tags are a grab bag of tags that didn't fit elsewhere. The longest is kink/fetish, which is a bunch of black, a bunch of white, a larger bunch of blue, and a bunch of red. It shows how kink flags tend to stick to four main colours and the blue just happens to be marginally the most common of the four. People of Colour has more consistency, with half of it being brown, and the rest being a mix of black and red. Vanilla is very consistently vanilla-coloured but it also makes clear there are not very many entries. Christian is basically the same as vanilla (lol). Jewish is a mix of blue, white, and yellow. Altersex is a broad range that tends towards red. Neuroqueer also has a range but it's more consistently green.ALT

Some distributions have a lot more variance within them than others. Generally speaking, major attraction types tended to have the least variance: sensual attraction is really consistently orange, platonic is really consistently yellow, etc.

Variance and size do not correlate. Many of the smaller tags are quite internally consistent. I don’t have a ton of tags in “current gender” but they’re all the same dark purple. Xenine/xenogender has a whole bunch of entries, and there’s a really big spread from blue to yellow.

Some tags, like intersex as well as kink/fetish show there are a small number of different colours that are very consistently used. Whereas other tags like masculine show a very smooth range – in this case from cyan to purple.

Overall I’m pretty satisfied with how things wound up! 🥳 It makes sense to me that an umbrella term like xenogender would have a lot of variance. What honestly makes me happiest is just how many tags wound up 180 or 90 degrees from their opposites/complements. 🤩

Not everything lined up nicely (the opposite of drag is …. neuroqueer? awkward.) 🤨 Some things lined up in hilarious ways, like how initially I had the opposite of kink/fetish being Christian (amazing.)

But as a whole, there’s a lot of structure and logic to where things landed! I hope this makes sense for other people and can help inform both flag making as well as flag interpreting (e.g. writing alt-text for existing flags). 🌈

I’m hoping to post the Disability and Values analyses in the coming days! If you want to learn more, my detailed notes along with tables etc are over on my Wikimedia Commons userspace. 💜

Everything here is Creative Commons Sharealike 4.0, which means you’re free to reuse and build on my visualizations, tables, etc. Enjoy!