Intersex pride flag designed by Organisation Intersex International Australia.
Intersex people are people who have sex characteristics that don’t fit inside the binary. This may be found out at birth or at a later point in life, such as puberty.
Being intersex is often treated as a medical condition which is to be fixed, with treatments such as hormone therapy or surgery to give people “normal” sex characteristics, and these procedures may be done without the child's or the parent’s consent if they are discovered as intersex at birth. Many intersex activists fight against this, and denote assigned sex using terms like CAFAB and CAMAB, standing for Coercively Assigned Female/Male At Birth. This means they were forced to have surgery to fit into a binary sex.
Even though intersex is widely known as part of the LGBTQIA+ community, standing for the I, some people don’t consider themselves part of the community.
Flag and Symbol[]
Most common Intersex symbol
The most used intersex flag was made by Morgan Carpenter in 2013. Yellow and purple were chosen instead of the strongly-gendered pink and blue. The purple ring symbolizes "wholeness and completeness" and "the right to be who and how we want to be."
The Mercury symbol (☿) is a common intersex symbol, used to match the male and female symbols. It was originally used for hermaphroditism. It depicts the staff of the Roman messenger god, based on the caduceus. It is sometimes used for other identities, such as non-binary people, androgyne people, gender-fluid people, or gender non-conforming people.