Intersex Inclusive Pride Progress Flag

Intersex columnist and media personality Valentino Vecchietti designed the new rendition of the rainbow Pride flag. The flag was officially unveiled by the advocacy group Intersex Equality Rights UK in late May 2021 and has since spread virally on social media. 

The proposed design builds on Daniel Quasar’s instantly iconic 2018 Progress Pride flag, which added a five-striped chevron to the left side of the flag representing LGBTQ+ people of color and the trans community. (Quasar’s design, in turn, was an update to the city of Philadelphia’s 2017 Pride flag, which added black and brown stripes above the six rainbow stripes.)

In Vecchietti’s rendition, a purple circle superimposed over a yellow triangle has been added to the chevron on the left half of Quasar’s design — an homage to the popular 2013 intersex flag designed by Australian bioethicist and researcher Morgan Carpenter.

The intersex community uses the colors purple and yellow as an intentional counterpoint to blue and pink, which have traditionally been seen as binary, gendered colors.

There’s a deeper meaning behind the circle, too. In a 2020 video for Intersex Peer Support Australia, Carpenter explains that the symbol of the circle is “about being unbroken, about being whole,” adding that “it symbolizes the right to make our own decisions about our own bodies.”

Vecchietti’s new intersex-inclusive Progress Pride flag is also a reflection of recent conversations around inclusivity underneath the broader LGBTQ+ umbrella. Intersex people have long been underrepresented and are rarely visually included in the Pride imagery that is ubiquitous every June. In recent years, the Pride flag has rapidly changed and evolved, first to bring attention to issues facing BIPOC people, then to ensure that the entire trans community was included in a single and more fully comprehensive symbol.