Non-binary flag

Adopted	2014
Designed by	Kye Rowan

The non-binary flag is a pride flag that represents the non-binary community, designed by vexillographer and blogger Kye Rowan in 2014.

Design

Kye Rowan created the pride flag for non-binary people in February 2014 to represent people with genders beyond the male/female binary.^[1] The yellow stripe represents people outside the cisgender binary. The white stripe represents people with multiple genders. The purple stripe represents people who identify as a blend of male and female. The black stripe represents agender people, who feel they do not have a gender.^[2]

The flag was not intended to replace the genderqueer flag, which was created by Marilyn Roxie in 2011, but to be flown alongside it, and many believe it was intended to represent people who did not feel adequately represented by the genderqueer flag.^[3][4]

The design of both the genderqueer flag and the nonbinary flag include the colour lavender (purple) in reference to LGBTQ+ history. The word lavender had long been used to refer to the gay community. A 1935 dictionary of slang included the phrase "a streak of lavender" meaning a person who was regarded as effeminate. A different-gender marriage where both parties were assumed to be gay was called a lavender marriage. The Lavender Scare was a moral panic in the mid-20th century, where LGBT+ people were dismissed en masse from their jobs with the United States government. Expressions used by the LGBT+ community are sometimes referred to as lavender linguistics (although some of these expressions were derived from African American Vernacular English, or AAVE).^[4]

References