Sego Visibility Flag

Overview

Salt Lake City adopted the Sego Visibility Flag as one of four official city flags on 6 May 2025. The design retains the five equal light-blue, pink, white, pink, and light-blue stripes of Monica Helms's Transgender Pride Flag. It adds the white sego lily and golden stamen from the city's 2020 flag in the upper hoist. The ordinance says the design represents the city's support for transgender and nonbinary communities and recognizes their belonging in Salt Lake City. ^[1]

The adoption occurred one day before Utah House Bill 77 took effect, restricting government flag displays while exempting municipal flags. The council approved the ordinance 7-0. ^{[2] [4]} The reviewed records do not identify the individual who combined the two source designs, so the composite designer remains unknown. Helms, Arianna Meinking, and Elio Kennedy-Yoon should be credited for their respective source designs rather than as designers of this municipal flag. ^{[5] [6]}

Identity & Context

Represented Identity

Transgender and nonbinary residents of Salt Lake City

National Context

United States; Salt Lake City

The ordinance states that the elements of the flag "collectively represent the City's support and acceptance of the transgender and nonbinary communities and recognizes their belonging in the City". ^[1] The city's flag page puts it as a commitment "to seeing and celebrating them". ^[6] Both are a city speaking about its residents rather than a community speaking for itself.

Creators

Origin

Country

United States

Region / state

Utah

City

Salt Lake City

Specific Place

Salt Lake City and County Building, 451 South State Street

Place Type

Municipal adoption

Salt Lake City stands on the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute peoples. ^[8] This note identifies the location of municipal adoption and does not attribute the Sego designs to those nations.

Indigenous land context

Shoshone — traditional and ancestral homelands of the Salt Lake Valley. The University of Utah's land acknowledgment records that the Salt Lake Valley "is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute Tribes and is a crossroad for Indigenous peoples", and that the land is named for the Ute Tribe. ^[8]

Paiute

Goshute

Ute

Salt Lake City is the documented place of municipal adoption: the City Council passed Ordinance 25 of 2025 at the Salt Lake City and County Building, 451 South State Street. ^{[2] [1]} The reviewed sources do not identify where the composites were drawn.

Dates & Chronology

Year Created

2025

Adopted by ordinance

May 6, 2025

In use

2025 to the present, as one of four Salt Lake City flags

Creation Bounds

Official sources first document the Sego composite in 2025, when the Salt Lake City Council adopted it on 6 May in the meeting that passed Ordinance 25 of 2025. ^[2] The mayor's office states that versions of the three underlying flag traditions "have been consistently displayed at City Hall during Mayor Mendenhall's time in office"; that is evidence of prior display of Pride, transgender and Juneteenth flags, not a date for the lily-bearing composite. ^[7]

The council took the ordinance as new business, suspending the rules to consider motions, with no public hearing set. Chris Wharton moved to adopt, Alejandro Puy seconded, and it passed 7 to 0: Victoria Petro, Daniel Dugan, Chris Wharton, Alejandro Puy, Darin Mano, Sarah Young and Eva Lopez Chavez all voting aye. ^[2]

Associated Press photography published by KUER documents the newly adopted city flags displayed at the Salt Lake City and County Building on 7 May 2025. ^[9] Project Rainbow Utah documented the Sego Visibility Flag raised at Salt Lake City Hall on 13 November 2025, at the annual flag raising opening Trans Awareness Week, writing that the city "designated the Sego Visibility flag an official city flag to continue showing support for our trans community". ^[10]

Utah House Bill 77, Flag Display Amendments, bars a government entity from displaying a flag on government property outside an exempt list, and bars displaying an exempt flag "with alterations in color, symbols, or appearance". Among the exemptions is "a flag that represents a city, municipality, county, or political subdivision of the state". The state auditor investigates complaints and may fine an entity $500 per violation per day if it does not cure within 30 days. The bill takes effect on 7 May 2025. ^[4] The enacted law does not name Pride, transgender or Juneteenth flags; news coverage and the bill's opponents described it in those terms, and Salt Lake City adopted its designs as city flags the day before it took effect. ^{[7] [1]}

The ordinance enacts a new chapter 1.09 of the Salt Lake City Code, City Flags, and states that the four city flags "equally represent the City". ^[1]

The sego lily in the upper hoist canton is the emblem of Salt Lake City's 2020 flag. The city opened a public call for submissions in spring 2020, received more than 600 entries, and narrowed them to eight for public rating and then to two finalists: a honeybee over a honeycomb, and a sego lily on a deep blue triangle under sky blue. The adopted flag merged the two, pairing the blue and white field with the lily. Its designers were Arianna Meinking, then 18 and recently graduated from West High School, and Elio Kennedy-Yoon, then 17 and a senior there. The mayor's letter announcing the flag is dated October 2020. ^[6]

Lineage

Direct predecessors

Transgender Pride Flag

Companion flags

Sego Belonging Flag, Sego Celebration Flag

Sibling flags

Anarcha-Queer Flag (transgender variant), Chicago Trans Pride Flag, Cisgender Ally Flag, "Fuck Around and Find Out" Trans Pride Flag, Nonbinary Trans Flag (2026, cirrus42), Progress Pride Flag

+ 4 more

Trans Ally Flag, Transgender Pride Flag with Transgender Symbol, Transneutral Pride Flag, Two-Spirit Transgender Pride Flag

The five stripes are the Transgender Pride Flag's, which Monica Helms created in 1999, in their usual order and proportions; the ordinance describes them without naming a source. ^{[5] [1]} The sego lily is the emblem of Salt Lake City's own 2020 flag. ^[6]

Ordinance 25 of 2025 adopted this design alongside the Sego Belonging and Sego Celebration flags, which share the same lily. They are companions adopted in one instrument, not siblings: the archive reserves that term for flags sharing a documented parent. ^[1]

Lineage tree

Every record reachable from this one through documented parent and child relationships: 2 records across 2 generations.

Ancestor

Transgender Pride Flag

This record

Sego Visibility Flag

Colors & Symbolism

The ordinance treats the design as a single statement rather than assigning a meaning to each stripe: its elements "collectively represent the City's support and acceptance of the transgender and nonbinary communities and recognizes their belonging in the City". ^[1]

Sampled from the city's published artwork. ^[3]

The symmetrical blue, pink and white design

"The City's commitment to seeing and celebrating the transgender and nonbinary communities." ^[1]

The sego lily

A flower that "has grown in the Salt Lake Valley for millennia", representing "the resilience, acceptance, and belonging that exemplifies Salt Lake City and its residents". The ordinance gives the same sentence to all four city flags. ^[1]

The golden stamen

"The future growth that comes with each succeeding generation." ^[1]

Three accounts sit behind this design and should not be merged. The ordinance treats the stripes collectively and assigns no meaning to any one of them. ^[1] The city's flag page is more specific, giving "pink and blue stripes used to represent men and women, and the white stripe, which represents those who are nonbinary, intersex, transitioning, or otherwise gender nonconforming". ^[6] Monica Helms's own account of the original flag differs again: light blue at top and bottom, "the traditional color for baby boys", pink beside them, "the traditional color for baby girls", and "the stripe in the middle is white, for those who are transitioning or consider themselves having a neutral or undefined gender". ^[5] The city's expanded white-stripe reading is the city's, not Helms's.

The ordinance names the colours in words and publishes no numeric values. ^[1] The values above are measurements from the city's published artwork, which is a JPEG, not an official digital specification. ^[3] The light blue and pink are the same values the city uses in the Sego Belonging Flag's chevron. The stamen samples #FEB415 in all three 2025 artworks, drawn at the same size in the Belonging and Visibility files and smaller in the Celebration file.

Design

Aspect Ratio

3:5 · standard

Ratio Notes

The ordinance specifies no proportion. Salt Lake City's published artwork is 1500 by 903 pixels, which is close to 3:5 without being exactly it. The archive records 3:5 as a standardized production ratio rather than an ordinance-specified measurement; Project Rainbow Utah manufactures the Sego flags at 3 by 5 feet. ^[3]

Orientation

horizontal

Stripe Count

5

Layout

horizontal stripes with a canton emblem

Stripes (Top → Bottom)

light blue, pink, white, pink, light blue

Additional Symbols

A white three-petal sego lily with a six-prong golden stamen in the upper hoist canton

The ordinance specifies "five horizontal stripes of equal size arranged in the following order from top to bottom" as light blue, pink, white, pink and light blue, with "a white three petal sego lily with a six prong golden stamen" in the upper hoist canton. ^[1] The design image incorporated in the ordinance matches the composition the city publishes. ^{[1] [3]}

Measurement of the city's artwork agrees: the five stripes run between 18.8 and 19.8 per cent of the depth each, equal fifths within the tolerance of a JPEG's edges, and the stamen spans 24 to 31 per cent of the width and 21 to 34 per cent of the depth. ^[3] The ordinance's text of this clause carries two typographical slips, "stipe" for stripe and "prog" for prong. ^[1]

Five horizontal stripes, light blue, pink, white, pink and light blue, with a white sego lily and a golden stamen in the upper hoist canton.

Usage & Adoption

Organizations

Salt Lake City, Project Rainbow Utah

Geographic Usage

Salt Lake City, Utah

Current Status

In use as one of four Salt Lake City flags

The ordinance leaves the choice of which flag to fly to the mayor: "The Mayor or their designee shall determine which City Flag or Flags to display at a given time." When more than one flag flies on a pole the order from the top is the United States flag, the Utah state flag, then a city flag. ^[1]

Project Rainbow Utah documented the flag raised at Salt Lake City Hall on 13 November 2025, opening Trans Awareness Week, alongside the mayor's office, the ACLU of Utah, the Utah Pride Center and other organisations. ^[10] Associated Press photography documents the newly adopted city flags displayed at the Salt Lake City and County Building on 7 May 2025. ^[9]

Image Archive

Official City Artwork

Discourse & Debates

Criticisms

• Utah Governor Spencer Cox criticised the city's flags after the June 2025 Juneteenth raising: "They're dumb flags, and it was a dumb bill," he said, adding that other groups were left out and "I'm sure they feel great that they got around this dumb law, and they did it with dumb flags." ^[11]

Community reception

The minutes record no public comment on this flag specifically. Two residents spoke to the flags as a group: Randell Hoffman "spoke in support of the proposed City flag designs and the long history of the LGBTQIA+ community in Salt Lake City", and Betty Sawyer, director of the Utah Juneteenth Freedom & Heritage Festival, spoke in support of the flag honouring Juneteenth. Council Member Darin Mano said the flags "were meaningful to him and his family and was an important and critical symbol for the people of the City to feel safe". The council's remarks are summarised in the minutes rather than quoted. ^[2]

The ordinance says "transgender and nonbinary communities"; the city's flag page says "the City's transgender community" and then names "those who are nonbinary, intersex, transitioning, or otherwise gender nonconforming" among those the white stripe represents. ^[1][6]

Footnotes & Citations

Image Sources

Rendering

The city's published artwork

• The city's own published rendering of the flag it adopted. ^[3] · Credit: Salt Lake City Corporation · SLC.gov · 1500 × 903Rights Published by Salt Lake City for download. The city states no licence beyond saying the design "is approved for creating flags and designs".
• Salt Lake City's published artwork for the Sego Visibility Flag, 1500 by 903 pixels, the file the city offers for download and the source of this entry's colour and geometry measurements. ^[3] · Credit: Salt Lake City Corporation · SLC.govRights Published by Salt Lake City for download; the city states no licence beyond saying the design is approved for creating flags and designs. The archive's WebP is a conversion of that file.