Intersex flag

A yellow field and a purple circle, in colours chosen to be free of gender associations.

What the colours mean

Yellow A colour chosen because it is not associated with either gender.
Purple circle Wholeness and completeness, and the right to decide about your own body.

Where it comes from

The intersex flag was designed in 2013 by Morgan Carpenter for Intersex Human Rights Australia, then called Organisation Intersex International Australia. It was created to be a flag that did not derive from the rainbow or from gendered pink and blue.

What the circle means

The circle is unbroken and unornamented. Carpenter described it as symbolising wholeness and completeness, and the potential of intersex people. It is often read as a statement about bodily autonomy: the right of intersex people to make decisions about their own bodies.

Where else it appears

Its yellow and purple were added to the Progress Pride flag in 2021, in the intersex-inclusive version designed by Valentino Vecchietti.

Questions people ask

What does the intersex flag mean?

Yellow and purple were chosen as colours free of gender associations, and the unbroken circle stands for wholeness, completeness and bodily autonomy.

Who designed the intersex flag?

Morgan Carpenter, in 2013, for Intersex Human Rights Australia.

In the glossary

Intersex Gender binary Allyship

Other pride flags

Transgender flagLight blue, pink and white, in a pattern that reads the same whichever way up you fly it.Rainbow pride flagThe first pride flag, designed in 1978, and still the one most people mean by the pride flag.Progress Pride flagThe rainbow flag with a chevron that brings people of colour and trans people to the front.Bisexual flagPink, purple and blue, with the purple where the other two overlap.Pansexual flagPink, yellow and blue: attraction regardless of gender, with a stripe for people outside the binary.Asexual flagBlack, grey, white and purple, chosen by the asexual community itself in 2010.Demisexual flagThe asexual flag's colours, rearranged around a black chevron.Aromantic flagFive stripes from green to black, with green chosen as the opposite of romance's reds and pinks.Genderfluid flagFive stripes for a gender that moves: femininity, the absence of gender, the mix, all genders and masculinity.Agender flagSeven symmetrical stripes, with black and white for the absence of gender and green for non-binary genders.Genderqueer flagLavender, white and green: androgyny, agender identities and genders outside the binary.Demiboy flagGreys, light blue and white: a partial connection to being a boy or a man.Demigirl flagGreys, pink and white: a partial connection to being a girl or a woman.