The rad community welcomes you!
Around June of 2018 I realized that the rainbow pride flag wasn’t very inclusive. The majority of people see it and only think about gay identified people, and forget about everyone else in the community. That's why people say "Gay Pride" instead of just "Pride" when talking about the Pride festivals. A group in Philadelphia tried to make the Rainbow Pride Flag more inclusive by adding a black and brown stripe to represent people of color (POC), and make them feel more included.
"Hope will never be silent."
- Harvey Milk
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Rad Pride Flag
Considering the history of POC erasure, this was a step in the right direction. It is important to acknowledge and address people who do not feel welcome, and actively make space for them. The thing is, there are many other marginalized people in the LGBTQIA+ community that a black and brown stripe does not account for. Just a few examples of these people are those who are disabled, living in poverty, or living without documentation.
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Then, Daniel Quasar from Portland, Oregon, created a version of the Rainbow Pride flag which had both the black and brown stripes, and the trans pride flag colors.
I realized, after seeing this flag, that one can have 11 colors in a flag and still not include everyone. I was inspired me to make a flag with limited colors that was really inclusive of everyone in the community. I created this new pride flag and called it the Intersectional Pride flag for the LGBT+ community. Vibrant red for femininity, vibrant blue for masculinity, dark purple for everything outside and inbetween femininity and masculinity, and grey for intersectionality. I presented what I then called the Intersectional Pride flag (which I sewed by hand) at my college's National Coming Out Day event. I had people write their identities on the flag.
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This flag, when it was the Intersectional Pride flag, included everyone in the LGBTQIA+ community. The femininity, masculinity, and everything outside and in between the fem/masc-binary relationship could be applied to biological sex, gender identity, and sexual and romantic orientation.
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But a flag so inclusive didn’t go well with the acronym LGBTQIA+. I realized you can have 7 letters that represent at least 10 identities, but if you don't have broad umbrella terms for letters, you can never add enough letters to represent all identities in the community. Adding a plus at the end acknowledges there are other identities, but by not including them as their own letter, ultimately erases them. LGBTQIA+ is long, and most people only say LGBT. In addition, the acronym is in a weird hierarchy, with identities generally being less accepted the farther down in line they are.
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I decided to make a new acronym. I created the acronym RIGS, which stood for Romantic orientation, Intersex, Gender identity, and Sexual orientation.The flag was now called the Intersectional RIGS Pride flag.
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After talking to folks about the RIGS acronym, and making a few realizations on my own, I realized there were people outside the RIGS acronym that experienced the same discrimination and oppression as people in the acronym RIGS. This included crossdressers, those in queer platonic relationships, polyamorous relationships, and those who experience sincere gender dysphoria who do not identify as transgender. I also found out that some intersex people who identified as straight and cis did not feel welcome in the queer community. I realized I had to change my acronym.
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I changed it to BAGER, for Body, Attractions, Gender, Expression, Relationships. Body combined both intersex people and those with physical gender dysphoria. After speaking to some intersex people about this new acronym, I realized by combining intersex with those with physical gendered dysphoria, then it would likely erase intersex people from the community. I finally made a new acronym, GRAIED. It includes everything from BAGER but also visibly includes intersex people.
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But I didn't want to call my flag the Intersectional GRAIED Pride flag. The original goal of my flag was to unite everyone in the community, and GRAIED is an acronym made up of English words for Western ideas of gender, attactions, relationships, and everything else that goes with it. The majority of people do not speak English, and many (I do not know what percentage) do not have the Western ideas of GRAIED. By calling it the GRAIED Pride flag, it would exclude the majority of people in the community.
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I love the idea of using the word queer as an umbrella term for everyone in the community, as it already is for the LGBTQIA+ community. But it is a slur that not everyone has reclaimed. I needed a new word that could be truly be inclusive of everyone in GRAIED, and the cross-cultural versions of it. (I do recognize that not all cultures have a translatable version, and that's okay, they are also included) I chose the word rad. So there it is. The...