Creation of the Pan Flag
Copied (with grammar/spelling mistakes) from my twitter thread about it for posterity.
I was going to do this for Pride weekend but you know, life, so: I wanted to talk about a thing. I created the #pansexual flag, a thread.
Back in 2010, I was 20 and tumblr was my main social playground. I was active in various spheres, and I was learning.
I'd been IDing as bi since I was 13, but moved away from bi as an identifier and took up pansexual soon after discovering the term, bc I felt it fit better.
This is mainly bc the simplicity of pan being defined as attraction to any/all genders was extremely appealing to someone really coming into this new way of expressing their orientation like tumblr allowed. It felt right for how I wanted to relate to and express my orientation.
The bi communities I had access too often saw heavy discussion related to attraction parametres of "bi" - convos at the time I didn't really recognise for what they were: bi people working hard to define bisexuality on their terms, tackling intra-community transphobia, (cont)
(cont) and developing within a social space where more expansive gender experiences and identities were becomes more well known and understood.
My switch of labels was about finding something that felt truly right for me, but it would be dishonest to pretend the decision wasn't impacted by the politics and "discourse" I was involved in at the time.
There was no popular pan flag, and the offerings were frankly... ugly. To me. Various shades of purple, P letters, P symbols incorporating gender symbols, infinity symbols. They didn't feel consistent with the other pride flags.
So on a whim, I decided to design one. I designed it to be pretty, honestly. That was a primary function of it, to have s/t I liked to represent my identity. No point pretending I was trying to be super innovative and deep: I wanted something pretty to plaster on my blog.
Pink, yellow, blue. A strong magenta, a strong gold yellow, and a light cerulean. The pink not too purple, the yellow not too bright, the blue not too cyan. Hex FF1B8D, FFD900, 1BB2FF.
Pink and blue, because of their gendered traditions, and yellow, a generally non-gendered colour, to represent nonbinary folks etc.
I created it anonymously, on a side blog away from my main handle. I was already running LGBTLaughs which was proving very popular in tumblr and didn't want to monopolise queer blog space, I suppose.
I didn't expect it to take off. It proved popular on tumblr, and for a few years the flag kept getting added to the Wikipedia 'pansexual' page and then removed. Eventually it snowballed and ended up in use well beyond tumblr.
As I've got older I've realised a lot of people would be interested in knowing this part of modern queer history, and more about modern flag creation in general, and that it's worth documenting. Not for credit so much as for posterity.
So, that's that. The first time I saw a pansexual flag in real life at my city's Pride parade I may have had a little cry.
Twitter Drama
Best viewed on the original twitter thread, for the full documentation (I may update this with fuller documentation down the line) but here's a rundown of drama surrounding the flag.
First, to set the stage:
posted about designing the pan flag
said i was cool with bi/pan lesbians
said i was cool with kink at pride
Thus followed, in varying intensity 2020-2022:
misgendering
suicide bait
general harassment/pile-on
"called out" on r/pansexuals
blasted on sapphics for satan (fb)
now sworn enemy of of lesbian kpop avi twitter
claims the original pan flag was transphobic in meaning
multiple "new" pan flags designed to displace the one i designed
claims i stole the flag from a medieval indian kingdom, and subsequent vandalisation of wikipedia for the actual state of kerala
vandalisation of the wiki page for the pan flag, resulting in it having to be locked
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evangelical christians are missing out with the whole not believing in evolution thing, that shit's cool as fuck
like look at this shit
this is an example of what are known as homologous structures. because of the similarities in bone structure, it suggests that all creatures shown here have a common ancient ancestor
essentially these all have the same bones, but shifted, stretched, fused, and warped by evolution and time to serve the purpose the animal needed
and they all do have a common ancestor, as does all life on earth
look at this crazy ass tree showing EVERYTHING started as a teeny tiny ancient bacteria and evolved and grew over millions of years to fucking EVERYTHING, all life being connected to this singular point
idk abt you guys but to me that's cool as fuck and I hate that people don't teach it in schools based on what a book said
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