A few years ago, the “trans flag” started to pop up everywhere. First created in 1999, the banner of alternating pink, blue, and white stripes flew from city halls; at protests; on government buildings; on public schools, Catholic schools, and even some churches. The creator of the flag described it this way: “The stripes at the top and bottom are light blue, the traditional masculine color. The stripes next to them are pink, the traditional feminine color. The stripe in the middle is white, for those who are transitioning or consider themselves having a neutral or undefined gender.”
In the mainstream press, the creator of the now-ubiquitous transgender flag is referred to as “American trans woman Monica Helms.” But as with so many of the architects of the Sexual Revolution, there is quite a bit more to the story. Helms was born Robert Hogge and identifies as female or “bigender,” claiming that his brain “floats between multiple roles…Sometimes I am a man and a woman at the same time, or I can change in a nanosecond, then change back just as fast.”
Who is Robert Hogge? By his own admission, he was a troubled teen who spent his time stealing his mother’s underwear, sexually experimenting, and cross-dressing. In the 1970s he joined the U.S. Navy and promptly began to steal the underwear of women who lived in his apartment building. According to his memoir, he became aroused by the sight of himself in women’s clothes, and by the end of the decade, he was a regular attendee at drag clubs—and decided that it was time “to rebuild myself in my own image…as a woman.”
He got married without telling his partner, Donna, about his proclivities. Unsurprisingly, she was upset when she found out about his cross-dressing. He continued to do so anyhow, investing large amounts of money into his transgender project and even attending classes on how to act feminine with other men. At age 46, Helms wrote, “I had entered my second puberty and acted the part.” His marriage broke down, and he and Donna divorced in 1997. Helms left his wife and children because he decided that his “shaved legs and breast growth” were more important and boasted that he promptly hit the sex clubs for “orgies.”
His next phase was identifying as a lesbian and short-story writer. Most of his stories were on themes better left unmentioned; one sexualized a child. In 1999, he designed the trans flag. According to Genevieve Gluck of Reduxx:
According to researcher Dr. Sarah Goode, CEO of StopSO (Specialist Treatment Organisation for the Prevention of Sexual Offending), pedophiles who organize online have developed their own culture, language, and symbols. One common symbol used in pedophile forums incorporates the colors baby blue, pink and white. In her lecture, ‘Hidden Knowledge: What We Ought to Know About Pedophiles,’ Dr. Goode shows a slide of the image and says, “The pink half represents ‘girl lovers’ and the blue half represents ‘boy lovers.’” The color code system appears to predate the initial design of the transgender flag and can be traced back to at least as early as 1997, according to online pro-pedophile forums. Areas in Europe that advertise child trafficking to pedophile sex tourists have used the color code: “blue curtains mean a boy child prostitute and pink curtains a girl.”
It is unclear whether Helms was aware of this correlation at the time, but when discussing the symbolism behind the trans flag, Helms has consistently stated that blue represents young boys and pink represents young girls: “The light blue is the traditional color for baby boys, and the pink is the traditional color for baby girls.” In the two decades since its creation, the transgender pride flag has been embraced by transactivists, medical institutions, and governments alike. It has been flown at academic institutions, from universities to preschools.
That flag now flies everywhere, not only during “Pride Month”—in Canada under Trudeau, “Pride Season”—but throughout the rest of the year. You can tell a lot about a culture by whom it decides to honor. These days, millions send their children to schools that fly the colonizing flag of a trans-identified man who created it after abandoning his wife and children to engage in cross-dressing orgies while claiming to be a woman. Those who advocate for these flags insist that those of us who do not support such behavior are bigots. We should treat such claims with contempt.