The other day someone was telling me about the transrace leaf symbol, unknowing that I was the one that coined it. It occurs to me that since I did a recoining blog post of the radqueer flower symbol I designed, then a recoining of the transrace leaf might be in order too. So here it is!
The transrace leaf is a symbol used to represent being transrace. The symbol is a leaf because, much like ethnicity, leaves look different all around the world! I also chose a leaf as a tongue-in-cheek joke about how leaves change color and transrace folks often wish to change the color of their skin. Like the radqueer flower symbol, I wanted it to be able to be drawn of one continuous line.
I wanted to create a symbol for being transrace for a couple reasons. The main one being that I think more identities should have symbols (I talk about why briefly in Recoining: Radqueer Flower Symbol), but also because I am personally not a fan of many of the currently existing transrace pride flags; a lot of them are based on skin tones, and I don’t think that makes for a very pretty flag, and it seems like an oversimplification of what being transrace is.
Now, I didn’t draw the symbols, I only designed them. The above symbols were actually illustrated by community member Maki. I am not a good artist, so the original symbol did not look very good, but after I posted it Maki touched it up and made it look much cleaner! I decided to adopt that as the official version of the symbol. (I talked to Maki, and they said that anyone can do anything with the symbol: modify it, share it, whatever!)
Additionally, I also designed a transjapanese sakura symbol that Maki created. (Though this time I just gave the instructions on how I wanted it drawn and Maki drew it for me!) It’s similar in concept to the transrace leaf, but instead of being a leaf it’s the sakura flower.
Stay radical! <<33
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