We get it. Keeping up with all the pride flags can be a challenge sometimes.
But this viral TikTok got it really wrong.
The video, shared on Facebook, shows a man standing in front of a large mural of the progress pride flag. In it, he claims that the added colors of white, light blue and pink stand for “minor-attracted persons or youth-attracted persons, the pedophile flag.”
The progress pride flag (Shutterstock)
The man in the video goes on to explain that the pink represents attraction to infant girls, the light blue stands for attraction to infant boys and the white “stands for attraction to virgin children.”
The Facebook post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The claim is wrong. Those colors are an attempt to incorporate the transgender pride flag into the more traditional rainbow flag.
The transgender pride flag was created in 1999 by U.S Navy veteran Monica Helms. The blue stripes represent the traditionally masculine colors, and the pink represents the traditionally feminine colors according to the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group. The white stripe in the middle represents people who are transitioning, intersex or nonbinary, meaning they identify as neither a man nor a woman.
The transgender pride flag (Shutterstock)
The colors do not represent attraction to children.
The progress pride flag featured in the video, which includes a triangle on the left side with five new colors, was created by artist Daniel Quasar in 2018. It was an attempt to build upon the Philadelphia pride flag, which added black and brown stripes for people of color.
“The trans flag stripes and marginalized community stripes were shifted to the Hoist of the flag and given a new chevron shape,” wrote Quasar on his website. “The arrow points to the right to show forward movement, while being along the hoist edge shows that progress still needs to be made.”
Others have tried to connect the colors to a flag design for “minor-attracted persons,” which began circulating a few years ago, but numerous fact-checkers have debunked this myth and found that this flag design is not at all related to the LGBTQ+ community or movement.
The new colors in the progress pride flag are meant to be inclusive of transgender people. It was not created to celebrate adults who are attracted to children. We rate this claim Pants on Fire!
This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.
