HETEROSEXUAL = MAN + QUESTIONING: A mobile game review

24 Apr, 2026

The mobile game LGBT+ Flags Merge defines heterosexual as a combination of man and questioning. That is not an out-of-context reading, nor a conjecture at the game's innermost worldview — it says so in the simplest way possible. LGBT+ Flags Merge is a Little-Alchemy-style game where you start with two flags (man and woman) and create new flags by merging them two at a time: for example, man + man = gay, man + woman = bisexual, gay + woman = twink, and so on. There are 171 flags representing sexualities and genders (by comparison, there were 151 original Pokemon). And it just so happens that when you combine the questioning flag and the man flag (but not questioning and woman), you get heterosexual.

This is, I think, a perfect moment. At once the flag for man stands for both masculinity and for the psychosexual aspect of oppression; at the drop of a hat, questioning is mined for the way it seems to negate queerness. In a bizarre reversal of "It's just a phase" rhetoric, we get to view heterosexual not as a default but as perpetual questioning, corrupted and flattened by some Lacanian brainworm. To put it another way, this moon logic happens because man + woman was already taken, because to the author heterosexuality is an afterthought. That's awesome, right? I think that's awesome.

Here's another interesting formula — the strategy to speedrun transgender:

1. Combine man + man = gay; combine man + woman = bisexual. (Lesbian will not be necessary.)

2. Combine bisexual with itself to make multisexual (an umbrella term containing "bi" and "pan", for two); combine multisexual with itself to make nonbinary.

3. Combine nonbinary with itself to make ningender (NIN stands for "neutral in nature"; it's a hypernym of nonbinary).

4. Combine gay + ningender = achillean (i.e. the male counterpart of "sapphic"; what we'd today maybe call MLM).

5. Combine achillean with itself to make nominsexual (attraction to everyone not MIN¹, or "masculine in nature").

6. Combine nominsexual with itself to create asexual. Combine asexual + nonbinary to get anonbinary, and then anonbinary + asexual = agender.

7. Combine agender + woman = transfem, agender + man = transmasc.

8. Combine transfem + transmasc = that's right, demigender!

9. Combine demigender with multisexual to create transgender.

I really, really like how long it takes to make one of the letters in LGBT+. Maybe I'm supposed to feel Othered by this, being so much more complicated than something like "gay", but I don't. It reminds me of the Intro to Proofs class I took freshman year, where part of the point is to see how much you can get done with a list of principles like "You can keep counting forever". I also chuckled that transgender isn't just transfem + transmasc. It's a good point, right?

This all feels like an earnest and honest snapshot of an idea and its history, way more than it would be if it were examining itself more critically. The author of the game would never say outright that "men" stands for subjecthood of any gender, but that's the implication of nominsexual + nominsexual = asexual, right? The extreme version of "not interested in men" is "not interested in people". There's a psychoanalytical framework at here, because the game is about constructing all queer identity from the base atoms of "man" and "woman"! It's beautiful.

I can keep going, but I feel like I'm repeating myself without some theory to latch on to. So let's get dialectical.

In the same way that epistemology has opposing forces of rationalism and empiricism, queer epistemology has opposing forces of queer rationalism and queer empiricism. By queer empiricism I mean the idea that knowledge about queerness comes from the sensorium, that the best way to think about this sort of thing is to talk amongst ourselves about our experiences. In contrast, a queer rationalist also wants to think about things, construct things from first principles.²

Some people or things privilege one over the other. For example, a game which defines 171 queer flags and organizes them in a way that proves they can all be derived from only the barest concept of binary sex? That's queer rationalism. Someone who thinks that the whole project is stupid, that words like "nofinsexual" are all a distraction from, like, housing rights or whatever? That's queer empiricism. My nonscientific belief is that it's the dominant ideology among queer people today, online and offline.

If I has to guess, the imagined audience of LGBT Flags Merge is a young queer person on Tumblr, circa 2010, at a time when it was a hotbed for a project called MOGAI. MOGAI is a queer rationalist project. The acronym MOGAI stands for "Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignments and Intersex", a clear response to the ever-ballooning acronym LGBTQIA+, and that's a pretty good summary of the program. Instead of setting outselves up to tack on letters forever, says MOGAI, why not just make an acronym that encapsulates the whole codomain of gender identity? The whole conceit is that if your gender / sexuality experience didn't have a name and generalized description (and a flag), you could make one and try to contextualize it logically within the greater project of everyone else doing so.

This whole project got a lot of shit. I wasn't "there" for MOGAI³ but I was there for the reaction to it, because it was omnipresent. The stereotypical blue-haired SJW, inconsolable at the thought of evidence that there are only two genders, is a strawman of MOGAI-ism. This video by Lily Alexandre is a much kinder and more thoughtful criticism, but concludes that the project is dead, useless, and was always something to be outgrown once its users log off and engage with "material" concerns.⁴

This is a queer empiricist critique, and I think it's both as well-argued as it can be and fundamentally doomed. I don't want to rag on the video too hard, because it's worth a critical watch, but I also think that the failure of its framing proves that there's a use for this dialectics crap. Alexandre seems especially bothered by the possibility of "hypothetical" genders that aren't used all that often in meatspace; the video's title implies that the sum output of the MOGAI movement is "millions of dead genders". The queer rationalist response might be that these "dead" genders aren't a tragedy — once you've discovered $\pi$, you've logically discovered a bunch of useless numbers like ${\pi }^{\pi }$, but you don't get to call mathematics a failed project for producing millions of dead numbers. This tennis court of a conversation could go back and forth forever, of course, and I hope it does. Suffice it to say, you can't just call one side of a dialectic ongoing reality and the other archaeology.

Earlier I said that my perception is that queer empiricism is currently dominant, but that it's only one side of a fundamental dialectic. If that's the case, then LGBT+ Flags Merge is not just a quaint portrait of a bygone era, but a statue to something that can and will eternally recur, an image of what it looks like when this project is put into motion, warts and all.

And the warts are there, to be clear. Asexual being nominsexual squared is funny and even meaning-making, but I admit there's an offensive miasma about it. What's much more damning is something like two-spirit = maverique + diamoric, or two-spirit + two-spirit = hijra. These counterexamples dissolve this whole project into mush, I think. When you resolve to describe every gender identity a priori without any discussion of human culture (much less subalternity) there's no good way to talk about, like, nádleehi. That's unbearable even before you consider that what fails to describe the marked minority also fails to describe the unmarked majority. In other words, the lack of cultural dependency that prevents hijra from fitting in smoothly also calls into question whether nonbinary fits smoothly.

But even if the project fails, there's something admirable about it. I really think there's something valuable and volatile, something trans and transgressive, about heterosexual = man and questioning. I think engaging with the duality of man as both masculinity and psychosexual phallic object is valuable, and something that the queer empiricist version of this project would refuse to do. Yes, says the game. We can acknowledge that we can describe the world of queerness starting from a smattering of facts about masculinity. We can conceptualize a trans knowledge that's after bigger game than securing rights or describing wrongs in some small section of time and space. It's also worthwhile to engage with the origins of transness within the body, the abstract relationships between gender and sexuality, the subversive ways we can talk about heterosexuality.

Furthermore, it's important to me that the project justifies transness instead of asserting it. I understand why people say "trans rights aren't up for debate", and begrudgingly accept the premise, but it is upsetting to hear. What's so special about trans rights that they can't be proven, like every other true thing? If trans people rule, why can't you just argue that, instead of siloing us off into a special zone of Validity Beyond Human Comprehension? This idea that we shouldn't debate trans stuff is an empiricist view, and one that feels omnipresent and awful to hear. And while I don't necessarily agree with the specifics of how LGBT+ Flags Merge derives transness, it's nice to see it trying. "Transness has to be built," it says. "Just like everything else. Not a problem, since the truth is on our side."

Despite it all, LGBT+ Flags Merge ends up being a safe way to engage with a dangerous idea. And that's a large chunk of what good art means to me.

#academia #games #queer #theory #trans