#autistic flags

Flag on top has the Autism Spectrum Nautilus on a plain white background, in the style of the neurodiversity flag. (It's actually an offwhite to be a little easier on the eyes).

Flag on bottom left uses the colour scheme from the controversial red-orange-gold-lime-green (ROYLG) autistic flag since I know many people like it and its colour scheme is pretty nice. (As far as I'm concerned the ROYLG flag is salvageable as long as the Métis infinity symbol is not used in it.) I use diagonal stripes in this flag as a reference to the disability pride flag.

Flag on bottom right uses the grey from the disability pride flag.

Why a nautilus? It's a reference to the Autism Spectrum Wheel, and also it has a fractal-like pattern that maintains the theme of infinity symbols. Also I think invertebrates are underappreciated. For those unfamiliar with the Spectrum Wheel:

The nautilus symbol is public domain, and an SVG is available here. The flags above are also public domain. So feel free to remix and reuse! 🧡

The newer version of the nautilus symbol used here drops the outline lines that were in the first version, thanks to a suggestion by my friend Océane.

Tagging for archival: @radiomogai @liom-archive @disabilityflagsarchive @disabilitypride @auti-archive @beyond-mogai-pride-flags Ty 🧡

This time I'm not complaining about using the white infinity symbol of the Métis. I wanna complain about this flag, made in 2021 by Autistic Empire:

This one upsets me as an intersex person. I get that the designers wanted to make a flag that's different from the neurodiversity flag, and that gold is a common choice for autism (Au = Gold).

The problem it's an icon on a solid golden yellow background, and that is Intersex Flag Territory.

For my perisex readers, these are intersex flags. The one on the left was made in 2013 by Morgan Carpenter so you'll hear people refer to it as the Carpenter flag sometimes:

A common technique in deriving flags for "intersex plus X" is to replace the purple ring with another icon in the same colour. Like these! (Note the intersex autism flag.)

So using the flag logic I'm used to for intersex flags, a rainbow infinity on a solid gold background means.... neurodivergent intersex!

I've talked to a few other intersex people who had the same reaction. It's kind of upsetting - intersex is so frequently invisible and sidelined at the queer table. My *emotional* reaction to the Autistic Empire flag has been "really, we intersex people can't have one thing?". (This is an emotional response not necessarily a rational response.)

Also annoying me is how Autistic Empire presents their 2021 flag on their Autistic Pride Day page beside the history that Autistic Pride Day started in 2005, which apparently gives people the idea that the Autistic Empire flag was created in 2005.

Best I can tell, this was the 2005 flag that Aspies for Freedom created. I know it was a rainbow infinity on a white background but I'm not 100% this was their design. (If you know please let me know!)

These oldest ND/autistic flags I can find with clear provenance are from 2013 and 2016:

The Autistic Empire design was created in 2021 by taking a 2016 neurodiversity infinity symbol design and sticking it on the gold background.

The prospect of solid gold backgrounds taking off as an autistic flag theme is scary to me. I've seen how queer Métis now have to explain that the Métis queer pride flag is not an autistic flag.

In my eyes, it fits into the greater trend of autistic flags being insensitive of other minorities' flags (see: the Metis flag). I think we as a community need to do better about this.

My fellow autistics I beg of you when doing flag designs: - google image search - has your idea already been used? Search the keywords you want before making a mock up - also text search on google and tumblr: <keywords> and <flag> - consult recommendations on how make an infinity symbol that does not look Metis - Wikipedia's list of flags by colour combination - once you have a mockup, return to google image search and this time search using the mockup - if you get feedback that your flag design is too similar to another group's flag, use this feedback. The person who is giving you the feedback might be upset, and if so, try to look past their tone and work past any defensiveness you may feel Edit to add: I'm keeping a list of autistic & ND flags that don't use the Metis infinity nor use a solid gold background here. If you know of more please let me know! <3

An autistic person whose special interest is spiders

This is my own take on the spinterest symbol :] feel free to make your own! I've added the symbol under the cut

Self indulgent, made by Saturn !!

Tag list: @aemogai-archive, @deaddemo, @radiomogai ask to be added to our approved archive accs ! Or if you just wanna be tagged in posts

After my latest autistic pride flag post, @pride-cat messaged me suggesting a mashup of the red-orange-yellow-lime-green (ROYLG) flag with the Autistic Pride Day logo. Here's what I came up with:

The top one uses the grey from the disability pride flag and the colours from the ROYLG flag. Bottom left uses a white background like the neurodiversity flag. Bottom right uses disability pride colours.

(At pride-cat's suggestion, I tried putting the APD logo on the ROYLG flag but felt like it blended into the background - you can see pride-cat's version here.)

@posting-stuffies tagged me about @ryanyflags's gold infinity icons, so here are two flags putting the gold infinity first on a plain white background then on the grey background:

While on the idea of "plain symbol for autism on a white background" I figured I'd make use of the aufinity symbol by @palpablenotion:

And then finally, this post by @spaghettimakesflags and this post by @themogaidragon inspired some more flag ideas that led to:

These are all free to use and remix! I hope this helps for moving people away from autistic flags that have Metis style infinity symbols in them (such as the original ROYLG design). 🧡

Code used to generate flag combinations is on github. SVGs here.

In the near future I'm thinking of putting out a survey of autistic flag options. I'm assembling a list of options here, so if you know of any autistic flag designs that don't use a solid white infinity that aren't in the document please let me know! 🧡

A big thank you to everybody who participated in the survey I put out a week ago asking folks to rate 60 different proposed autism flags on a scale of 1 to 5.

I have put together a shortlist of 13 flags based on the results of survey #1, and a second survey which asks people to rate the ten flags along different criteria (aesthetics, symbolism, accessibility, etc).

💛 Survey #2 is open for responses here! 💛

Shortlist selection exposition: To assemble a shortlist of flags for survey #2, I looked at which flags from survey #1 had a median of at least 3 out of 5. I considered flags with a median of 2 or less to be nonviable: too many people disapprove of them.

I then sorted the flags from which had the highest proportion of votes for strong agree (SA) to least. I think this is an important measure for flags to consider. A flag that is popularly viewed as "eh it's fine but I don't love it" seems unlikely to get a lot of uptake. These designs had a median above 3 and ≥20% strong agree (SA) Sorted from highest SA to lowest (left to right, top to bottom)

The Extranthaic version (upper right) of the Julietanboy design (below, left) consistently outperformed the original Julietanboy design, having a higher mean (3.5 vs 3.3) and higher SA rate (21% vs 20%). So Survey #2 only includes the Extranthaic version.

These designs had a median of 3 and ≥15% SA Sorted from highest SA to lowest (left to right, top to bottom)

The nautilus on plain grey had a lower median and mean than the nautilus on grey with diagonal stripes (3 vs 4, and 3.3 vs 3.4, respectively). But it had a higher SA rate (24% vs 23%).

Some folks in the reblogs of Survey #1 said they preferred flags with more simple colour schemes, so I tried adding in some simplified versions of the nautilus with just 7 or 8 shell segments after the survey went live. The 7-segment variant outperformed the 8-shell variant, but still was not as popular as the original. So, Survey #2 only has the 9-segment version.

The pun flag did rather well in terms of SA (19%), though it had a relatively low mean of 2.9.

These designs had a median of 3 and ≥10% SA Sorted from highest SA to lowest (left to right, top to bottom)

The nautilus on plain grey consistently outperformed the nautilus on plain white, which had a mean of 3.0 and SA of 13%. So I didn't include the nautilus-on-white in the second survey.

Of the flags with concentric infinities, the version with disability pride colours on plain white did the best (mean: 3.0, SA 15%). The one with ROYLG on grey had a mean of 2.9 and SA of 13%. These flags had a median of 3 but below 10% SA Sorted from highest SA to lowest (left to right, top to bottom)

Most of the flags in this set have a distribution that is a bell curve centred around 3 -- most people were neutral on it, and not that many people were strongly for nor strongly against.

The original Autistic Empire flag outperformed the versions which segmented the infinity. It stood out for having a rather skewed distribution: 8% of participants gave it a strongly agree, versus 24% who gave it a strongly disagree.

Full results of survey #1 here