I spent a while trying to find a simple answer to this. I think it’s most easily interpreted as:
Bi: Implies you like both of the genders. No real preference.
Pan: implies you recognize there is a range of masculinity and femininity, and of course cis and trans, and thus you are attracted to a range of genders. Not explicitly feminine or masculine, but likes anyone on the spectrum of genders.
not saying you’re necessarily implying that, but it’s a general stereotype which, while it can be true on an individual level, certainly isn’t when taken as a whole
Oooh I had not seen that. With this in mind, I have to just assume that pan came about not knowing that bi had already by definition not limited to the two typical genders.
I had not thought bi to be transphobic, nor that bisexuals actually fit into interest in just two separate genders. I just thought it was perhaps an outdated term that sounds that way. Thank you for the clarification!
There really needs to be more discussion on this stuff. I only recently discovered the terms gynosexual and androsexual. Those could have been super useful when I was younger.
I’ve heard some people describe pansexuality as being attraction without regard to gender. This makes intuitive sense to me, speaking as a bisexual whose attraction to different genders feels different qualitatively
Isn’t that omni? I’m attracted to all people but like you the differences hits different so omni feels like a better fit than pan, but I still call myself pan or bi because nobody knows what the hell omni is.
Is there a label that includes everyone except golfers? Asking for a friend.
Perhaps. Being neither pansexual nor omnisexual, I don’t feel especially well equipped to comment on this, but I get the sense that the semantic relationship between “pansexual” and “omnisexual” is probably similar to the relationship between bisexuality and pansexuality. That is to say, effectively being synonyms, except for subtle distinctions that can contextually matter to the people who identify as those things. So like, I would say that “bisexual ≈ pansexual” and “pansexual ≈ omnisexual”. Like if I were to think of this in terms of the evolutionary relationships between words, it feels like the concepts of pansexuality and omnisexuality are more closely related than omnisexuality and bisexuality.
Like I say though, I don’t have a good personal sense of what the distinction between pan and omni is — though I’m realising that this may be an opportunity to develop my understanding. Are you able to articulate what it is about “omnisexual” that resonates with you more than “pansexual”? My personal experience with labels is that finding a more specific one that feels like it fits better is that the better label hits more of the right notes than the previous label — so what I’m asking is what notes does omnisexual hit that pansexual doesn’t (or what notes does “pansexual” hit that don’t feel right for you?).
To give an example of what I mean about things fitting better, I find that whilst I still readily identify as bisexual, I find that “queer” better captures my vibe nowadays, because it gets at the fact that my preferred mode of relationships is actively anti-heteronormative (even when in a straight-passing relationship)
You articulated that better than I could. For the pan/omni difference, for me it is the pan “gender blind or not seeing gender” definition that feels slightly dissonant. I appreciate all gender presentations and genitalia in different combinations and find it interesting and sexy and definitely part of the equation and I feel pan misses the mark on that. It’s mostly an academic distinction to me but someone coined the term because they felt it was an important enough distinction to warrant a different term so it’s clearly important to some. Who am I to disagree?
I think the main problem here is that even people within the community confuse “sex” with “gender”.
Sex is a biological concept. According to biology, mammals have two sexes. Period.
Gender is a social/cultural/psychological concept. There’s a whole spectrum of genders.
Wouldn’t that mean that “bisexual” is someone attracted to the physical/biological attributes of of both sexes, while “pansexual” is someone attracted to the range of social/cultural/psychological attributes on the gender spectrum?
I like this approach because it is quite disruptive to the framework that you describe, wherein sex and gender can be simplified by understanding them as completely separate, and sex framed as a simple binary. To be clear, this isn’t me saying you’re wrong; I like the phrase “all models are wrong, some are useful”. I also think that the model you describe is also one that I sometimes find useful in talking about this stuff, even if I think it’s an oversimplification. I like things that disrupt this simplicity because I’m a big nerd who also happens to be a scientist in a different side of the life sciences — I used to think of science as something we could apply to the world to get the unruly chaos of life to obey our understanding. Increasingly, I think that we could do with being a bit more humble and realising how many of the things we think we’ve solved actually have hidden layers of complexity. I think this is very cool and exciting, because I am a massive nerd.
I think you’re missing nuance with ‘mammals have two sexes. Period’ - there’s a range of intersex possibilities, chromosomes that don’t match organs, chromosomes that aren’t xx or xy (e.g xxy), genetic chimeras with more than one set of sex chromosomes. What you mean is ‘usually’
I spent a while trying to find a simple answer to this. I think it’s most easily interpreted as:
Bi: Implies you like both of the genders. No real preference.
Pan: implies you recognize there is a range of masculinity and femininity, and of course cis and trans, and thus you are attracted to a range of genders. Not explicitly feminine or masculine, but likes anyone on the spectrum of genders.
bisexuality isn’t inherently transphobic!
not saying you’re necessarily implying that, but it’s a general stereotype which, while it can be true on an individual level, certainly isn’t when taken as a whole
here’s the bisexual manifesto, also, since it goes hard: https://bitheway.carrd.co/#manifesto
Oooh I had not seen that. With this in mind, I have to just assume that pan came about not knowing that bi had already by definition not limited to the two typical genders.
I had not thought bi to be transphobic, nor that bisexuals actually fit into interest in just two separate genders. I just thought it was perhaps an outdated term that sounds that way. Thank you for the clarification!
There really needs to be more discussion on this stuff. I only recently discovered the terms gynosexual and androsexual. Those could have been super useful when I was younger.
I’ve heard some people describe pansexuality as being attraction without regard to gender. This makes intuitive sense to me, speaking as a bisexual whose attraction to different genders feels different qualitatively
Isn’t that omni? I’m attracted to all people but like you the differences hits different so omni feels like a better fit than pan, but I still call myself pan or bi because nobody knows what the hell omni is.
Is there a label that includes everyone except golfers? Asking for a friend.
Perhaps. Being neither pansexual nor omnisexual, I don’t feel especially well equipped to comment on this, but I get the sense that the semantic relationship between “pansexual” and “omnisexual” is probably similar to the relationship between bisexuality and pansexuality. That is to say, effectively being synonyms, except for subtle distinctions that can contextually matter to the people who identify as those things. So like, I would say that “bisexual ≈ pansexual” and “pansexual ≈ omnisexual”. Like if I were to think of this in terms of the evolutionary relationships between words, it feels like the concepts of pansexuality and omnisexuality are more closely related than omnisexuality and bisexuality.
Like I say though, I don’t have a good personal sense of what the distinction between pan and omni is — though I’m realising that this may be an opportunity to develop my understanding. Are you able to articulate what it is about “omnisexual” that resonates with you more than “pansexual”? My personal experience with labels is that finding a more specific one that feels like it fits better is that the better label hits more of the right notes than the previous label — so what I’m asking is what notes does omnisexual hit that pansexual doesn’t (or what notes does “pansexual” hit that don’t feel right for you?).
To give an example of what I mean about things fitting better, I find that whilst I still readily identify as bisexual, I find that “queer” better captures my vibe nowadays, because it gets at the fact that my preferred mode of relationships is actively anti-heteronormative (even when in a straight-passing relationship)
You articulated that better than I could. For the pan/omni difference, for me it is the pan “gender blind or not seeing gender” definition that feels slightly dissonant. I appreciate all gender presentations and genitalia in different combinations and find it interesting and sexy and definitely part of the equation and I feel pan misses the mark on that. It’s mostly an academic distinction to me but someone coined the term because they felt it was an important enough distinction to warrant a different term so it’s clearly important to some. Who am I to disagree?
I think the main problem here is that even people within the community confuse “sex” with “gender”.
Sex is a biological concept. According to biology, mammals have two sexes. Period.
Gender is a social/cultural/psychological concept. There’s a whole spectrum of genders.
Wouldn’t that mean that “bisexual” is someone attracted to the physical/biological attributes of of both sexes, while “pansexual” is someone attracted to the range of social/cultural/psychological attributes on the gender spectrum?
This is somewhat of a tangent to your point, but this is a really cool article that looks over how human biological sex is more complex than most realise: https://scatter.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/sex-as-a-social-construct/
I like this approach because it is quite disruptive to the framework that you describe, wherein sex and gender can be simplified by understanding them as completely separate, and sex framed as a simple binary. To be clear, this isn’t me saying you’re wrong; I like the phrase “all models are wrong, some are useful”. I also think that the model you describe is also one that I sometimes find useful in talking about this stuff, even if I think it’s an oversimplification. I like things that disrupt this simplicity because I’m a big nerd who also happens to be a scientist in a different side of the life sciences — I used to think of science as something we could apply to the world to get the unruly chaos of life to obey our understanding. Increasingly, I think that we could do with being a bit more humble and realising how many of the things we think we’ve solved actually have hidden layers of complexity. I think this is very cool and exciting, because I am a massive nerd.
I think you’re missing nuance with ‘mammals have two sexes. Period’ - there’s a range of intersex possibilities, chromosomes that don’t match organs, chromosomes that aren’t xx or xy (e.g xxy), genetic chimeras with more than one set of sex chromosomes. What you mean is ‘usually’