#disabled flags

Happy disability pride month! After many months of discussions and three rounds of polls, we have new meanings for the disability pride flag! Thank you to @capricorn-0mnikorn (the flag's designer!) for all the suggestions along the way, and everyone else who gave input! 💚

In this system, rather than have each stripe represent a different category of impairment (physical, sensory, etc), each stripe represents a different model of disability ❤️💛🤍🩵💚 They are:

🩵 The social model of disability (blue): understanding disability as something that is caused by societal factors like lack of accessibility, rather than as a medical condition. For example, many wheelchair users consider what is disabling about being a wheelchair user is the lack of ramps, elevators, paratransit, etc.

The social model differentiates disability (which is social) from impairment (one's physical/mental limitations), inspired by the idea that gender is social and sex is biological.

The social model is kind of the OG model, and was big with the early disability rights movement. It influenced so many others that came after it, because it doesn't work for all disabilities, or even for all situations.

💚 The political minority model of disability (green): understanding disabled people as an oppressed minority who experience societal ableism, and who are working collectively to resist this oppression. This model isn't concerned with how or why people are disabled, it focuses on the ableism we experience. For example, folks with ME/CFS trying to get medical care and being dismissed, and the blind community suffers from braille illiteracy.

💛 The affirmation model of disability (yellow): disability is an identity worth taking pride in! Deaf gain, not hearing loss. Neurodiversity as something that enriches humanity. Whereas the social model is opposed to the medical model of disability, the affirmation model is opposed to the deficit model of disability.

❤️ The debility model (red): this is a postcolonial model that focuses on how colonial and racist violence cause disablement; like people who are injured by war, or preventable diseases like AIDS. This model differentiates disability, which has a clear before-and-after, from debility, which is a slow wearing out through repeated colonial/racist/etc violence. Unlike the affirmation model, this model views some disabilities as worth preventing, and focuses on how disability is used as a tool of racist/colonial/etc oppression.

🤍 Other models (white): there are lots of other models of disability! Like the medical model (disability is a medial problem), the human rights model (disabled people need human rights laws), and the cultural model (disability is a social construction). Models are lenses used for understanding disability, and one might use one lens in one context, and and another in a different context.

Why these colours? In brief: ⚪ White is often considered the combination of all colours. 🩸 Red has associations with blood and violence. 😁 Yellow has associations with happiness. ♿ Blue is associated with accessibility. 🟩 Green is a combination of yellow (affirmation) and blue (social), or for how the political minority model has grassroots organizing, in contrast to the human rights model.

🖤 Dark grey (or black) continues to represent our collective mourning of disabled lives lost to ableism, eugenics, violence, suicide, abuse, and neglect.

SVG version of the infographic here. ❤️💛🤍🩵💚

Thank you!

Crip Pride Flag

This is a flag for crips and those who feel represented by/part of crip theory, crip pride, and/or general cripness. [SVG version on WC]

Crip is a term that is open to people with ALL disabilities (physical or otherwise) and also to groups who share the crip mindset. (Note different spelling from cripple.)

For folks who like details: I'm gonna explain what crip is for those who may be new to the term! Then I'll talk about the flag design how the different stripes represent different models of disability. 💜

What is even is crip?

Like how "queer" is to LGBT+, "crip" is to disabled. It's an umbrella term, a way of seeing the world. Activist reclamation of "crip" goes back to the 1970s, with disabled performance artists popularizing the term in the 1990s.

Crip theory began in the early 2000s by building on queer theory. Expanding on your [QCI's] recent post, its characteristics are:

Understanding disability as socially constructed.

Fuck capitalism: the social construction of disability as we understand it was a result of the development of capitalism.

Fuck eugenics: Ableism and racism have been entwined for hundreds of years and cannot be understood in isolation.

Fuck colonialism: which is itself debilitating. Violence disables people, and Global South activists have been clear it's important to talk about how war, landmines, etc are disabling.

Disabled people are creative. Where queer-ing refers to a way of being critical of categories, cripping tends to focus on subverting ideas of ability. Disabled people ARE the original makers/hackers.

Disabled people are experts: we know shit. It is *us* who should be the epistemic authorities on disability, *not* physicians.

Crip as a term is open to anybody experiencing the violence of eugenic thought, regardless of identification as "disabled".

Fat studies scholars have been locating themselves as within crip theory since day one. Similarly, reading Cripping Intersex by Orr has made clear to me that intersex has always been crip.

Again, drawing a parallel to queer & LGBT: kink and polyamory may not be LGBT but they are Queer. 🌈

Flag details

The design is based on @capricorn-0mnikorn's Disability Pride Flag. In line with newer meanings for the Disability Pride flag, the stripes represent different models of disability associated with crip theory:

Purple represents the social construction of disability and the influence of queer theory. #82609b is from the Mad Pride flag.

Red represents postcolonial understandings of disability such as debility. Understanding that which chronic illnesses receive care and research is *political*. The choice of #CF7280 is a nod to the AIDS flag. I took the red from the disability pride flag and shifted the hue (but not chroma & lightness) to that of the AIDS flag.

Yellow represents the affirmative and identity models of disability. The opposite of the tragedy model. Many disabilities can actually be beneficial! The choice of #f4db75 is a nod to the intersex flag.

White represents how crip pride and crip theory are pan-disability. It stands for models of disabilities not otherwise represented here. The #E8E8E8 white is also a nod to the neurodiversity flag.

Blue represents the social model of disability, the intellectual progenitor of the social construction model (and crip theory in turn). The choice of #83bfe5 is a nod to the Deaf flag.

Green represents eco-crip theory, the eco-social model of disability, and other crip engagements with environmentalism. The choice of #48af75 is a nod to the nonhuman flag. Because being a cyborg (alterhuman) is a proud tradition of crip theory.

The repetition of purple serves to show crip pride & theory exist within a social construction framework. Also it widens the amount of the flag which is stripes, reflecting how crip includes groups not consistently understood as disabled (e.g. fat, intersex).

As with the disability pride flag, the dark grey (#595959) represents the lives lost to ableism and our collective grief.

Tagging @radiomogai @mad-pride @liom-archive for archival. And I wanna acknowledge @scifimagpie for giving me feedback on dozens of prototypes. 💛

EDIT 2024-09-20: new survey on intersex disability flags & coining!

[original post continues...]

The flag on the top with the disability pride rainbows on both sides of the flag is for understanding intersex as part of the disability community. Having the stripes on both ends represent people with other disabilities standing in solidarity with intersex people & fighting the same fights against pathologization, for bodily autonomy, etc.

Considering intersex to be part of the disability community is NOT the same thing as considering intersex to be a medical disorder (intermedicalism). Many disabled people are actively fighting medicalization, with groups like the capital-D Deaf community, mad pride, and the neurodiversity movement being examples.

The flag on the lower left with dark grey on both sides represents people who have disabilities caused by being intersex. For example: chronic pain as a result of IGM, (C)PTSD from medical trauma. People with disabilities linked to being intersex, such as Deafness attributed to MRKH, are also welcome to use this flag.

Finally, the flag on the lower right is for intersex people who also have non-intersex disabilities (e.g. ADHD, EDS, Long Covid). It's an alternative to @queercripintersex's disabled intersex flag for people who prefer the disability pride flag over the universal symbol of access.

I personally interpret @queercripintersex's disabled intersex flag as a flag for intersex and disabled in any way: so it would include people who are disabled solely due to being intersex AND people who are intersex who have non-intersex-related disabilities.

Finally, I wanna coin ~terms~ to go with the first two flags! (Intersex is in disability community; disability secondary to being intersex). But I've been indecisive about what to call them. Disintersex is a solid contender.... but which flag should it be for? 🤔 Interdisabled already has an unrelated meaning. Interdissex is open. Variations on crip also have potential, but I know it's a contested term.

So: two polls! Both polls have the same options, so when voting consider that I want distinct names for the two flags. First poll is below, second poll will be in a second post. 💜

Cripintersex: an intersex individual who considers the intersex community to be a member of the broader disability community and/or that intersex rights/justice should be considered part of the disability rights/justice movements. 💜

In the survey I recently ran where I asked people about candidate terms & flags for disability-intersex intersections, this was the overwhelmingly favoured candidate term for this meaning.

It had a weighted average score of 4.4 out of 5 (5 is strongly agree / highly suitable). Screenshot of spreadsheet is at bottom of this post. Part 1 (has a similar flag) - Part 2 (has analysis info) - Part 3

For the Discourse-Averse

Given this is Tumblr and the word crip has a way of evoking Discourse, multiple survey respondents and people in my notifications requested that a non-crip term ALSO be coined should cripintersex come out on top. Which it did.

I'm going to suggest sociodisabled as a term for identifying as part of the disability community, and politicodisabled as a term for identifying as part of the disability rights/justice movements more specifically. So intersex-sociodisabled would be sociodisabled on the basis of being intersex.

These terms weren't in the survey (alas!) but came out of a suggestion made in the open-ended feedback for sociodisintersex as a non-crip alternative. Thank you, anonymous respondent! 💜

I posted a similar-looking flag for this meaning in Part 1 of the survey results, that I'm tentatively thinking of as the intersex-sociodisabled flag. This flag is different in two ways: - it uses the stripes from the Crip Pride Flag - the yellow background and purple ring now match the yellow and purple used in the Crip Pride Flag (which I'm also hoping will help with eyestrain 🤞)

And now: Some Discourse

With that out of the way, I'd like to carefully point out a few things in good faith. I've been doing a bunch of thinking on this and reading a lot more about cripplepunk. 💜

Some folks have pushed back on the idea that crip would be appropriate for intersex on the grounds that "crip is for physical disabilities". I would gently like to respond that the most common interpretation of the term "physical disability" is a disability which affects the body (i.e. not mental). 🙂

If one is to understand intersex as a disability, and then try to categorize it as mental/physical/sensory, intersex would be a physical disability. Being intersex is a physical, embodied thing. It is not a gender. It is not a brain thing. It's a category of physical differences. Physicians understand us as physically disfigured and/or having a chronic condition. They consider us within the scope of teratology research, just like Down Syndrome and kyphoscoliosis.

Part 1: four flags and coining of interdebilitated

Part 2: inter-iatrogene and interimpaired (two flags & coinings)

The following three flags represent three different positions that disabled intersex people may hold about what connection (if any) there is between being intersex and disabled.

Intersex-linked disability: an intersex person who has one or more disabilities that are linked in any way to being intersex. This is an umbrella category which includes:

Having a disability that is commonly correlated to your intersex variation (e.g. Deafness and MRKH)

Having an iatrogenic disability (e.g. chronic pain caused by IGM) - i.e. being an inter-iatrogene

Debility due to intersexism (e.g. PTSD from intersexism) - i.e. interdebility

Seeing your personal intersex variation as personally being a disability (e.g. "I find my salt-wasting CAH a disability but I am not trying to claim everybody with this variation does.") - i.e. interimpaired

I wanna explicitly note that like every other intersex-disability combination, this is inclusive of ALL models of disability. While the medical model is a very common way in our society of understanding disability, identifying as disabled (or "with a disability") does not mean that one subscribes to the medical model. 💙

Right: Intersex with unrelated disability. The complement of intersex-linked disability (on the left). Note it's not mutually exclusive: for example, somebody with intersexism-associated PTSD may also wind up with long covid and see that as unrelated to being intersex.

Left: It's complicated! Not everybody has an easy time identifying/articulating what relationship their disability identity has to their intersex disability. Sometimes things are just unclear. 💙

Survey results

Part 1 here with flags for four other ways that intersex and disability can go together and one new coining

Left: Inter-iatrogene. an intersex person with an iatrogenic disability. Iatrogenesis is the term for when medical intervention causes illness or disability. This will often overlap with interdebility. But an intersex person who willingly chooses a surgery which causes them an unintended disability (e.g. chronic pain) would be an inter-iatrogene and not interdebilitated. An intersex person who has PTSD from a (non-medical) hate crime would be interdebiltated and not an inter-iatrogene.

Right: Interimpaired: seeing your individual case of your personal intersex variation as a disability. For example, somebody who understands their salt-wasting CAH as a disability, but is not trying to claim that everybody with CAH understands their variation that way.

Survey results: relevant details

[Edit from 2025-06-30: Poll Round 3 is here, we landed on political minority model for green!]

Earlier this month I set up a poll asking folks what model of disability they would associate with the colour green. The idea is to have each stripe of the Disability Pride Flag represent a different model of disability.

You can learn about different models of disability here! As is, we've settled on, blue is the social model, yellow is the affirmation model, red is the debility model, and white is the catch-all for all models not otherwise represented.

But green has been a tricky one! So I put up a poll, and hilariously it ends in a tie: 22.5% for both the human rights model and the eco-crip model. Time for a run-off vote!