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!
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?