Happy pan visibility day! 🩷💛🩵
Due to some queer accounts on Instagram posting about celebrations of today, I had to get reminded that there are still some awful queer people focusing on discourse about that “bi vs. pan” shit.
There is a tendency for battle-axe bisexuals to state that “bisexual and pansexual mean the exact same thing” with the intent of equating the two because they want to invalidate anyone who identifies as pansexual instead of just identifying as bisexual, but I realized something… this is actually biphobic as hell, not bi-affirming like they think!
Of course, sexual orientation labels are neologisms for a person’s own comfort, so being linguistically prescriptivist about them at all is absolute nonsense that anyone who perpetuates this “bi vs. pan” shit doesn’t understand.
However, to illustrate my point coherently, a common definition of “pansexual” is a sexual orientation which entails not regarding gender in your attraction. If a battle-axe bisexual asserts something like “Well, bisexuality means not regarding gender too!”, then they are literally invalidating every fucking bisexual person that regards gender in their attraction (and there are tons of those). There are many bisexual people who will explicitly say that they regard gender.
To grasp at straws so hard to invalidate people who identify as pansexual that you’ll shit out a misconceived biphobic myth that invalidates numerous bisexual people is basically saying “being indirectly biphobic to own the goofy MOGAI pans.”
I identify as both bisexual and pansexual simultaneously, so every time this kind of discourse comes up, especially when people have the intent to put bisexuality and pansexuality as “at war” with each other makes me double facepalm.
No one should invalidate anyone’s identity. No one should invalidate their own personal interpretation of it. Pansexual people should respect how bisexual people identify themselves. Bisexual people should respect how pansexual people identify themselves. Everyone should just respect other people’s labels PERIOD!
Bottom line is that the LGBTQ+ community needs to get over label discourse and policing entirely. You’d think “respect people in how they personally identify” wouldn’t be a controversial take for queer people BUT… here we are.
Love all of my m-spec buddies, BTW!
I’m nonbinary, and bisexual, because it confused The Straights, and because Bi has longer a history to it, and I like that.
Honestly, back when I used to just say “I’m bisexual” just to simplify my sexuality for hets, there were so damn many of them who asked “What? How could you be non-binary AND bisexual?”, so I totally get this energy.
I’m bi or pan or something in that realm, but I’m not 100% sure I understand what you mean by “regard gender” (not meant to be dismissive quotes) or what it would look like to be bi and regard gender. Would that be like holding your attraction in separate spaces for different genders vs having a mostly similar experience of attraction regardless?
Clearly there is a larger context I’m not aware of. I’m aware of transphobic notions that bi excludes trans people somehow, and the push against it but that’s the depth of my awareness.
Edit: never mind, the wiki you linked answered my questions. I didn’t notice it on first read https://lgbtqia.wiki/wiki/Multisexual
To give an example of what regarding gender as a bisexual person may manifest as, it can literally be as simple as something like “I prefer my men tall and my women short.” The difference is that, although into multiple genders, bisexual people who regard gender can have different manifestations of how they specifically find men attractive and how they specifically find women attractive. A pansexual person might not have this mentality, and if they were to convey a similar sentiment, they might say something like, “I like my masculine partners tall, and I like my feminine partners short.” Notice how there’s no emphasis on gender here, and not all bisexual people can relate to that kind of mentality, and that’s okay!
The thing is that labels are personal, and it’s up to the individual to describe for themselves how they interpret a label and its definitions. Some people literally pick whether they’re bi or pan based on flag alone, and that, once again, is totally valid.
I identify as both, and I see bisexuality and pansexuality a part of the same multisexual umbrella. Although I generally say “pansexual” as a single term if someone asks how I label my sexual orientation, I definitely wouldn’t hesitate to respond to a question that says something like, “Bisexual people, how did you explain bisexuality to your family?” to give an example.
Either way, we are in the same community. The oppressive structures that promote the notion that it’s only acceptable to find one gender attractive don’t care if you regard gender or not, but the infighting is still all pointless!
It is very common for bisexuals to struggle with their identities because they feel attraction to masculinity and femininity in different amounts, frequencies, or ways. The concept of pansexuality is very useful to these people as a sort of exception that proves the rule. Bi people who try to erase the pan identities are extremely goofy, and I assume have never spoken to another bi person in real life.
As a pansexual person, I also get people who constantly ask me questions where they assume that I give two shits or even one shit about gender. To give a NSFW example…
NSFW Example
I’ve had sex with both men and women. I’ve had people ask me “Woah, which did you prefer?” and it’s got nothing to do with gender at all. There were some women I enjoyed having sex with more than men. There are some men I enjoyed having sex with more than women. I never looked at it from the perspective of “Wow, doing that with women was so much more fun!” or expressing that sentiment with men either. How I handle that kind of activity with people is dependent on so many factors, but gender is not one of them. It’s such a confusing question when people ask me that because it’s on a false premise, the premise that gender factors into how I handle sexual and romantic matters at all. It has zero to do with gender for me. Regardless of whether a bisexual person regards gender or not, these kinds of questions are cringe anyway, though.
There is a common tendency to gender everything, especially the context of romantic and sexual relationships. I take so much solace in the fact that pansexuality, as a label, allows me to clarify that I do not gender any aspect of my romantic and sexual interactions because, as a non-binary person, I’d be the first to know how frustrated I am with how frequently things get gendered for the wrong reasons or no good reason at all.
just wanna share that a question like that could be a badly phrased way of expressing a desire to learn about what they’re missing out on, or just get the juiciest info, without having putting much thought into the implications of the words they’re using.
Regardless of intentions, the premise of the question still is completely inapplicable to me. As long as gender has something to do with the question, this premise is inapplicable for me. If it wasn’t about gender, they wouldn’t phrase the question like something even close to that. How could one possibly misinterpret something like “Did you prefer doing it with men or women?” in a way that doesn’t have to do with gender?
How could one possibly misinterpret
“Do you prefer inserting a penis into a vagina?”
You did say misinterpret, but when cishet assumptions get in the mix, I think it’s plausible that this is what they really mean.
