Every definition I have heard for pansexuality or similar that defines the term in contrast to bisexuality reads like slander to my ears.
Bisexuality is a broad category, and it was never exclusionary. Bisexuals can be attracted to trans people, and enbies, and those with or without gendered presentations, but critically they donāt have to be. Its a category not a checklist.
Bisexuality is broad. Other terms are more specific, and there is some amount of overlap.
As a trans woman, I am deeply opposed to the idea, implied by many definitions, that the only people who can find me attractive are those with a specific trans inclusive sexual orientation. Its both invalidating, and completely untrue in reality.
As a trans woman, I am deeply opposed to the idea, implied by many definitions, that the only people who can find me attractive are those with a specific trans inclusive sexual orientation. Its both invalidating, and completely untrue in reality.
This. Trans women are women. As a bisexual woman, I am attracted to women.
Trans people are also included in the bisexual manifesto, written in 1990
In fact, donāt assume that there are only two genders.
The way I always understood it was bisexual = attraction to your gender and other genders
and pansexual = attraction regardless of gender
now, functionally speaking, there is no distinction, but in terms of experience, I always identified more with pansexual than bisexual, as someoneās gender was just never something I took into account when determining my attraction.
I often to use both, as I consider pansexual to be a sub-distinction of bisexual.
That being said I recognize there is no consensus on the distinction in the community so I usually go with bi for ease.
Statements like this are exactly why i STOPPED identifying as pan and stick to bi/queer now. How pretentious and judgmental to say pansexuals care abt personality while bisexuals only care about looks. Itās just more bi erasure.
Not gay enough for the gays
Not straight enough for the straights
Not bi enough for the pans
Bisexuals can like trans and NB people, I promise ;)
Pansexual: Attracted to people regardless of gender characteristics.
āPanā because gender is functionally irrelevant. Any and all genders accepted because it doesnāt matter.
Bisexual: Attracted to multiple genders specifically because of their gender characteristics.
āBiā in the sense of being ābi-directionalā in attraction, usually attracted to specific gender traits and as a result not all genders, just more than one.
For instance, Iām finsexual, which is a subcategory of bisexual because it describes specific gender elements that I am attracted to but is not a sub category of pansexual as a result.
Ok yeah that makes sense. The way Iāve conceptualized it is that pan is attracted to all genders or to people regardless of gender and bi is attracted to two or more genders. I think the way that commenter phrased it is a great way to think about it
Yeah, the only way pansexual makes sense, to me at least, is if bisexual excludes feminine presenting men and masculine presenting women, but I donāt see why it should. I feel like pan was just created either to make certain people feel like theyāre being more inclusive than just normal bi people, or to make bi people feel like theyāre being exclusive.
A lot of the gender and sexual orientation language of recent times is good and removes ambiguity. Some of it though, like pan, feels like people just treating it as a contest.
hildegarde already said the reason why Pansexual exists. Bisexual is a broad category, a REALLY broad category to the extent if someone tells you bisexual youāve really learned nothing about their attractions unless they tell you.
Ehich flows off the tongue better, all inclusive bisexual or pansexual?
I always took the difference as pan means youāre sexually aroused and attracted to peopleās personalities, regardless of their body, and bi means you like dicks and vaginas. Itās probably not very useful but out of the people I know that go both ways, the ones that are ok with casual sex call themselves bi and the ones that arenāt use pan.
No? Thatās demisexual. Pansexual is youāre attracted to all (pan- means all) types of people, which is effectively equivalent to bi. Note attraction does not mean you like that person. You donāt even need to know someone to be attracted to them.
Meh, idk i think theyāre two different things. Plenty of people i really like and love but zero sexual attraction. A few people i had great sex with and didnāt like them at all.
Sure. Sexual orientation is defined as the innate attraction though. Itās the attraction you have to someone you see walking down the street. Obviously the right kind of interactions can overcome this and make someone attracted to someone they werenāt originally attracted to though, or vice versa.
As a trans person and a pansexual, I would describe it like this:
I donāt have a type. I donāt even necessarily tend to find people attractive until I get to know them a bit. The people I find āhotā arenāt tall people or feminine people or strong people or anything like that, instead I think clothing choices that tell me something about you and give me a feel for who you are as a person are hot.
If iām attracted to you, I will find myself attracted to your body, rgardlesss of what your body happens to be like. You could literally be a glob of goo or an alien or a talking rock, if I like you Iāll start thinking youāre hot.
If youāre thinking āisnāt that demisexualā? then youāre halfway there - iām not ace. I do think people are hot when I pass them on the street, except what iām attracted to is their āvibeā rather than anything about their physical form.
Naturally, pansexual is a subset of bisexual - iām also proud to be bi and I use that label frequently. And yes both bi and pan are trans-inclusive.
You wrote off demi too fast. When you say you find people passing with a good vibe hot, are we saying aroused, or are we saying āAh, yes, quite the fuckable one, thatā. Because thereās a third option and bi or pan only cover one while demi covers two.
If I can get enough of a read on someoneās personality, then yes I can be aroused, lip bite, letās fuck, etc. more or less right away. I do need to get to know someone to be into them but that process can happen extremely quickly, including at a glance if I can get enough of a sense of someoneās personality from what theyāre wearing/other context clues.
Ah gotcha. I cant relate to the feeling but I can conceptualize it I think. I fall under demisexual so while Iām highly sexually charged, arousal by a random person takes a lot of work to get to. To clarify further, Iām male, but I have so many turn-offs that people are essentially classified as unsexy by default until Iāve done heavy vetting (social and psychological conversational prodding to determine a personās place in the metacontextual zeitgeist). Then on top of that I have physical and presentational preferences so finding partners is practically impossible. I got lucky that a Tinder date turned into the best LTR of my life, and a person I couldnt imagine being without now.
This said, Iām very familiar with attraction after vetting, but social signifiers have rarely in my experience told me who a person was. Perhaps Iām more distrustful than you, but I canāt imagine getting past my sensors with only a glance. Iāve learned too many times that people are seldom what you think they are at first glance.
To this extent, are you saying that a bi/pansexual has more physically charged sensors for attraction, and so that conversation is not necessary? To that end, is additional conversation LESS attractive? I ask because Iāve run into this feature with cis straight women, where my yapping turns them completely off, even if my body was green for them. Not through offence mind you, I notice they just get bored or overwhelmed with the conversation and wanted a spicier encounter.
The way I frame it is: Bisexuals are attracted to you because of gender, pansexuals not. The ven diagram of attraction is mostly the same. Itās more about the why. Like I find masculine and feminine traits individually hot no matter who presents them, makes me bi.
I learned what bi/pan was from a random discord user back in 2016 and I still think its the best description
Bi: Sexually attracted to looks, personality can obv play a big part/be a deciding factor but your main attraction comes from how physically attractive you think they are
Pan: Sexually attracted to personality, looks can obv play a big part/be the deciding factor but your main attraction is how much you like their personality
Againā¦ Not dogging on you, because you nuanced it, but 99% of times, that definition is used to make bisexuals look shallow. The parent comment was right, thereās no good reason to have two, except that the creator wanted to feel special and unique.
Is it shallow to want to fuck someone because their hot? Isnt that literally the societal norm? The majority of interaction ive had by far are people with sexual attraction on looks that ive personally just never been able to relate too. Thats why I think there needs to be a distinction for those of us who dont feel that sexual attraction even if their aesthetic appearance is something we would be sexually atteacted too after being attracted to their personality
Althoughā¦ Thinking about it that might fit under demisexual, but then you cant specify the gender, so demi-bisexual? Honestly maybe pansexual should just be the pretty name for demi-bisexual although I think others using pansexual would say its different from demi, or maybe omni would say their more demi-bisexual. Idk im definitely with you that there are too many labels, but I think sexual atteaction between physical and closeness/personality deserve to have a distinction
No no no. Hi itās me the parent commenter. I did not say that. There is reason to have both terms. Please donāt put words in my mouth.
That definition does exemplify my point about definitions reading as slander to bisexuals, as that definition does imply bisexuals are shallow, but that does not mean pansexuality isnāt a valid or useful term. The problem is trying to make a definition that is strict and draws a fine line between bisexuals and pansexuals. That cannot be done.
This is a grey area. Bisexuality is a diverse spectrum. The terms need to be a little fuzzy with some overlap. And thatās fine. The real world doesnāt fit neatly into the boxes we try to make for it.
Its good we have both the terms bisexual and pansexual. Its a very good thing we have words to communicate some of the many nuances that exist.
Itās not shallow to not get horny at everyone, it just is what it is. Either you become physically sexually aroused at the thought/sight/sense of someone or you donāt.
The issue becomes that we now have omnisexual, polysexual, pansexual, and bisexual.
We have labels on top of labels to describe once natural, barely labeled human behavior, millennia ago, even centuries ago in many precolonial parts of the world. In many cultures people just were who they were, they didnāt need to declare themselves as one thing to make sure that people didnāt commit the ultimate scandal: classifying them with another group. And I get that Iām being exaggerative here, and I am not ignorant to the fact that much of this behavior arises against societal violence (not only physical) from the assumed normative identity (whiteness, heterosexual, cis, etcā¦).
But we donāt unfuck this hegemonic society by further segregations of increasingly niche labels, while placing more weight on such labels. It is no coincidence these arise mainly from online or otherwise reclusive, isolated spaces. The death murder of third spaces, unions, community, and collective action is designed to do exactly such things.
All this to say, as I mentioned in another comment that I donāt think labels are inherently destructive, but that we have lost ourselves: as a species, as a society, as individuals. We donāt really know what healthy human behavior outside of a hegemonic, capitalist, imperial world looks like. Itās why things like anthropology are so important, but that also has so many issues that stem from the same hegemonic corruption of academia. In ālosingā ourselves, we place such great importance on helpful but limited labels to close that subconscious hole of identity loss. And they start out small, but increase and become gaping. The ironic part is by now, this has so little to do specifically with bisexuality or pansexuality, and my critiques have broadened. I really am not attached to one label over another, but that doesnāt mean that I think we can just keep defining new ones to compensate.
Like someone responding to you said, it simply results in what we were always going to have to do, talk and get to know complex people. Instead of āoh thereās x person. Heās gay, but a twink not a bear, and I heard heās problematic because x thing vs y thingā¦ā And yes, I have heard people shove entire infinitely diverse human beings so violently into little boxes, so they āknowā immediately how to judge them, pity them, hate them, etcā¦
Sorry this is so long. I have a lot of thoughts on this wider conversation about labels and our modernist societyās addiction to classifying everything and anything. Like you said, and Alan Watts, life isnāt boxes. As he says, there are no straight lines in nature just wibbles.
I think the problem is that identifying as pan vs bi doesnāt really communicate anything, because thereās not a meaningful consensus of what either word means in relation to the other. The definitions vary wildly depending on whoās using them, so you have to clarify either way and you may as well just explain your sexuality in more direct terms if the nuances matter.
This. I feel like the more terms we create to specify the nuances of reality, the more niche labels get created to differentiate from that new word. Itās a recursive tree that betrays reality into increasingly disconnected illusion we tell ourselves is reality but isnāt.
I actually yearn for a world where labels donāt really exist the way they do now. I know that sounds crazy at first, but how beautiful a world where you can meet your friend John, and introduce him to someone, and thereās no immediate categorization of this personās identity. Itās probably a pipe dream, I recognize that, but so many of our definitions now are defined in opposition to something else. Gay is not straight, trans is not cis, bisexual is not gay or straight, ethnic means not white (in our current context).
And itās not like I think labels are inherently bad, but one of the sayings I try to live my life by is: methods are meant to serve us, not us serve methods. When we make once helpful tools into a false reality, we end up serving the things meant to simply aid us. I donāt know exactly how it would look, and thatās the cool part: I donāt have to, it would be a societal discourse. But to have all these competing, oppositional, binding terms simply be subsumed under personhood. Which of course demands the ending of normative culture: heteronormativity, whiteness, patriarchy, etc. As currently, those are our ānormalā.
But in a just society would it be so bad to simply see a person and just let them be them? Maybe it would be, maybe Iām leaving out crucial aspects in my limited, single outlook. But man, I can dream.
I mean, practically, if someone tells me theyāre bi or pan, it doesnāt really change my view of them. Like thereās not really any practical difference insofar as something I would need to know to treat them somehow. Like if Iām trying to flirt with someone, and if I was a man, and that person I find out is a a lesbian, then I wouldnāt. But if theyāre bi or if theyāre pan, it doesnāt change that.
There is a difference, Iām not saying there isnāt, and Iām not saying we should only use one if the two. Iām just saying the need for clarifying is overblown. If Iām curious why they picked one over the other, I might ask, but again, itās not super critical for anything.
But is there really a difference, then? Both words communicate the same thing, i.e. being attracted to multiple genders. Anything beyond that is so subjective as to not really be meaningful beyond prescriptive queer discourse.
Whatās the alternative youāre suggesting? That they donāt use the label that best suits them? That they donāt use the definition they prefer when asked why they identify as they do? This feels sort of half baked. I get where youāre going, but to what end? Suggesting they use a different definition or a different label just for convenience is pretty problematic.
Every definition I have heard for pansexuality or similar that defines the term in contrast to bisexuality reads like slander to my ears.
Bisexuality is a broad category, and it was never exclusionary. Bisexuals can be attracted to trans people, and enbies, and those with or without gendered presentations, but critically they donāt have to be. Its a category not a checklist.
Bisexuality is broad. Other terms are more specific, and there is some amount of overlap.
As a trans woman, I am deeply opposed to the idea, implied by many definitions, that the only people who can find me attractive are those with a specific trans inclusive sexual orientation. Its both invalidating, and completely untrue in reality.
This. Trans women are women. As a bisexual woman, I am attracted to women.
Trans people are also included in the bisexual manifesto, written in 1990
The way I always understood it was bisexual = attraction to your gender and other genders
and pansexual = attraction regardless of gender
now, functionally speaking, there is no distinction, but in terms of experience, I always identified more with pansexual than bisexual, as someoneās gender was just never something I took into account when determining my attraction.
I often to use both, as I consider pansexual to be a sub-distinction of bisexual.
That being said I recognize there is no consensus on the distinction in the community so I usually go with bi for ease.
Iāve always understood it as pansexual being attracted to personalities and bisexual being attracted to physical attributes
Statements like this are exactly why i STOPPED identifying as pan and stick to bi/queer now. How pretentious and judgmental to say pansexuals care abt personality while bisexuals only care about looks. Itās just more bi erasure.
Not gay enough for the gays Not straight enough for the straights Not bi enough for the pans
Bisexuals can like trans and NB people, I promise ;)
Youāre reading more into it than you need to.
All homo- and hetero-sexuals care about physical attributes too.
All pans Iāve met, doesnāt care about any physical traits.
I guess that does kind of align with my understanding, just in slightly more simplified terms!
I knew that was from Anything That Moves before I got past the first sentence lol
absolutely, and therefore i like the def of HalfSalesman. It nicely distinguishes between pan and bi, whilst avoiding any dated anti-trans ideas.
I would like to hear that definition if you have it on hand
itās in this comment section: https://vger.to/lemmy.world/comment/25858715
Ok yeah that makes sense. The way Iāve conceptualized it is that pan is attracted to all genders or to people regardless of gender and bi is attracted to two or more genders. I think the way that commenter phrased it is a great way to think about it
I tell straight people Iām bi, i tell queer people Iām pan.
That way, you see, ha ha, I get the best of both worlds
But then youāre missing out on all that bottom fun!
God. Always that one guyā¦.
Yeah, the only way pansexual makes sense, to me at least, is if bisexual excludes feminine presenting men and masculine presenting women, but I donāt see why it should. I feel like pan was just created either to make certain people feel like theyāre being more inclusive than just normal bi people, or to make bi people feel like theyāre being exclusive.
A lot of the gender and sexual orientation language of recent times is good and removes ambiguity. Some of it though, like pan, feels like people just treating it as a contest.
hildegarde already said the reason why Pansexual exists. Bisexual is a broad category, a REALLY broad category to the extent if someone tells you bisexual youāve really learned nothing about their attractions unless they tell you.
Ehich flows off the tongue better, all inclusive bisexual or pansexual?
I always took the difference as pan means youāre sexually aroused and attracted to peopleās personalities, regardless of their body, and bi means you like dicks and vaginas. Itās probably not very useful but out of the people I know that go both ways, the ones that are ok with casual sex call themselves bi and the ones that arenāt use pan.
No? Thatās demisexual. Pansexual is youāre attracted to all (pan- means all) types of people, which is effectively equivalent to bi. Note attraction does not mean you like that person. You donāt even need to know someone to be attracted to them.
But liking a person can cause attraction, right?
Meh, idk i think theyāre two different things. Plenty of people i really like and love but zero sexual attraction. A few people i had great sex with and didnāt like them at all.
Sure. Sexual orientation is defined as the innate attraction though. Itās the attraction you have to someone you see walking down the street. Obviously the right kind of interactions can overcome this and make someone attracted to someone they werenāt originally attracted to though, or vice versa.
Isnāt that basically just Demisexual
As a trans person and a pansexual, I would describe it like this:
I donāt have a type. I donāt even necessarily tend to find people attractive until I get to know them a bit. The people I find āhotā arenāt tall people or feminine people or strong people or anything like that, instead I think clothing choices that tell me something about you and give me a feel for who you are as a person are hot.
If iām attracted to you, I will find myself attracted to your body, rgardlesss of what your body happens to be like. You could literally be a glob of goo or an alien or a talking rock, if I like you Iāll start thinking youāre hot.
If youāre thinking āisnāt that demisexualā? then youāre halfway there - iām not ace. I do think people are hot when I pass them on the street, except what iām attracted to is their āvibeā rather than anything about their physical form.
Naturally, pansexual is a subset of bisexual - iām also proud to be bi and I use that label frequently. And yes both bi and pan are trans-inclusive.
You wrote off demi too fast. When you say you find people passing with a good vibe hot, are we saying aroused, or are we saying āAh, yes, quite the fuckable one, thatā. Because thereās a third option and bi or pan only cover one while demi covers two.
If I can get enough of a read on someoneās personality, then yes I can be aroused, lip bite, letās fuck, etc. more or less right away. I do need to get to know someone to be into them but that process can happen extremely quickly, including at a glance if I can get enough of a sense of someoneās personality from what theyāre wearing/other context clues.
Ah gotcha. I cant relate to the feeling but I can conceptualize it I think. I fall under demisexual so while Iām highly sexually charged, arousal by a random person takes a lot of work to get to. To clarify further, Iām male, but I have so many turn-offs that people are essentially classified as unsexy by default until Iāve done heavy vetting (social and psychological conversational prodding to determine a personās place in the metacontextual zeitgeist). Then on top of that I have physical and presentational preferences so finding partners is practically impossible. I got lucky that a Tinder date turned into the best LTR of my life, and a person I couldnt imagine being without now.
This said, Iām very familiar with attraction after vetting, but social signifiers have rarely in my experience told me who a person was. Perhaps Iām more distrustful than you, but I canāt imagine getting past my sensors with only a glance. Iāve learned too many times that people are seldom what you think they are at first glance.
To this extent, are you saying that a bi/pansexual has more physically charged sensors for attraction, and so that conversation is not necessary? To that end, is additional conversation LESS attractive? I ask because Iāve run into this feature with cis straight women, where my yapping turns them completely off, even if my body was green for them. Not through offence mind you, I notice they just get bored or overwhelmed with the conversation and wanted a spicier encounter.
The way I frame it is: Bisexuals are attracted to you because of gender, pansexuals not. The ven diagram of attraction is mostly the same. Itās more about the why. Like I find masculine and feminine traits individually hot no matter who presents them, makes me bi.
The definitions Iāve known are that bisexuality is that you are attracted to all body types and pansexuality is that you are attracted to people.
So, one is more physical and the other is more social, but thereās no slander to either, no?
I for example wouldnāt say ace biromantic, Iād define it as ace panromantic since bi has more of a physical vibe. Idk, itās not so deep.
I learned what bi/pan was from a random discord user back in 2016 and I still think its the best description
Bi: Sexually attracted to looks, personality can obv play a big part/be a deciding factor but your main attraction comes from how physically attractive you think they are
Pan: Sexually attracted to personality, looks can obv play a big part/be the deciding factor but your main attraction is how much you like their personality
Againā¦ Not dogging on you, because you nuanced it, but 99% of times, that definition is used to make bisexuals look shallow. The parent comment was right, thereās no good reason to have two, except that the creator wanted to feel special and unique.
All heterosexuals and homosexuals care about physical traits, often regarding a genitalia.
Itās not about being shallow, when 90%+(?) of the population shares that commonality.
I consider myself a panromantic, heterosexual non-binary person.
Sure personality matters a lot to me, but I canāt sexually engage with a penis. Itās just how it goes.
Is it shallow to want to fuck someone because their hot? Isnt that literally the societal norm? The majority of interaction ive had by far are people with sexual attraction on looks that ive personally just never been able to relate too. Thats why I think there needs to be a distinction for those of us who dont feel that sexual attraction even if their aesthetic appearance is something we would be sexually atteacted too after being attracted to their personality
Althoughā¦ Thinking about it that might fit under demisexual, but then you cant specify the gender, so demi-bisexual? Honestly maybe pansexual should just be the pretty name for demi-bisexual although I think others using pansexual would say its different from demi, or maybe omni would say their more demi-bisexual. Idk im definitely with you that there are too many labels, but I think sexual atteaction between physical and closeness/personality deserve to have a distinction
No no no. Hi itās me the parent commenter. I did not say that. There is reason to have both terms. Please donāt put words in my mouth.
That definition does exemplify my point about definitions reading as slander to bisexuals, as that definition does imply bisexuals are shallow, but that does not mean pansexuality isnāt a valid or useful term. The problem is trying to make a definition that is strict and draws a fine line between bisexuals and pansexuals. That cannot be done.
This is a grey area. Bisexuality is a diverse spectrum. The terms need to be a little fuzzy with some overlap. And thatās fine. The real world doesnāt fit neatly into the boxes we try to make for it.
Its good we have both the terms bisexual and pansexual. Its a very good thing we have words to communicate some of the many nuances that exist.
Itās not shallow to not get horny at everyone, it just is what it is. Either you become physically sexually aroused at the thought/sight/sense of someone or you donāt.
The issue becomes that we now have omnisexual, polysexual, pansexual, and bisexual.
We have labels on top of labels to describe once natural, barely labeled human behavior, millennia ago, even centuries ago in many precolonial parts of the world. In many cultures people just were who they were, they didnāt need to declare themselves as one thing to make sure that people didnāt commit the ultimate scandal: classifying them with another group. And I get that Iām being exaggerative here, and I am not ignorant to the fact that much of this behavior arises against societal violence (not only physical) from the assumed normative identity (whiteness, heterosexual, cis, etcā¦).
But we donāt unfuck this hegemonic society by further segregations of increasingly niche labels, while placing more weight on such labels. It is no coincidence these arise mainly from online or otherwise reclusive, isolated spaces. The
deathmurder of third spaces, unions, community, and collective action is designed to do exactly such things.All this to say, as I mentioned in another comment that I donāt think labels are inherently destructive, but that we have lost ourselves: as a species, as a society, as individuals. We donāt really know what healthy human behavior outside of a hegemonic, capitalist, imperial world looks like. Itās why things like anthropology are so important, but that also has so many issues that stem from the same hegemonic corruption of academia. In ālosingā ourselves, we place such great importance on helpful but limited labels to close that subconscious hole of identity loss. And they start out small, but increase and become gaping. The ironic part is by now, this has so little to do specifically with bisexuality or pansexuality, and my critiques have broadened. I really am not attached to one label over another, but that doesnāt mean that I think we can just keep defining new ones to compensate.
Like someone responding to you said, it simply results in what we were always going to have to do, talk and get to know complex people. Instead of āoh thereās x person. Heās gay, but a twink not a bear, and I heard heās problematic because x thing vs y thingā¦ā And yes, I have heard people shove entire infinitely diverse human beings so violently into little boxes, so they āknowā immediately how to judge them, pity them, hate them, etcā¦
Sorry this is so long. I have a lot of thoughts on this wider conversation about labels and our modernist societyās addiction to classifying everything and anything. Like you said, and Alan Watts, life isnāt boxes. As he says, there are no straight lines in nature just wibbles.
I think the problem is that identifying as pan vs bi doesnāt really communicate anything, because thereās not a meaningful consensus of what either word means in relation to the other. The definitions vary wildly depending on whoās using them, so you have to clarify either way and you may as well just explain your sexuality in more direct terms if the nuances matter.
This. I feel like the more terms we create to specify the nuances of reality, the more niche labels get created to differentiate from that new word. Itās a recursive tree that betrays reality into increasingly disconnected illusion we tell ourselves is reality but isnāt.
I actually yearn for a world where labels donāt really exist the way they do now. I know that sounds crazy at first, but how beautiful a world where you can meet your friend John, and introduce him to someone, and thereās no immediate categorization of this personās identity. Itās probably a pipe dream, I recognize that, but so many of our definitions now are defined in opposition to something else. Gay is not straight, trans is not cis, bisexual is not gay or straight, ethnic means not white (in our current context).
And itās not like I think labels are inherently bad, but one of the sayings I try to live my life by is: methods are meant to serve us, not us serve methods. When we make once helpful tools into a false reality, we end up serving the things meant to simply aid us. I donāt know exactly how it would look, and thatās the cool part: I donāt have to, it would be a societal discourse. But to have all these competing, oppositional, binding terms simply be subsumed under personhood. Which of course demands the ending of normative culture: heteronormativity, whiteness, patriarchy, etc. As currently, those are our ānormalā.
But in a just society would it be so bad to simply see a person and just let them be them? Maybe it would be, maybe Iām leaving out crucial aspects in my limited, single outlook. But man, I can dream.
I mean, practically, if someone tells me theyāre bi or pan, it doesnāt really change my view of them. Like thereās not really any practical difference insofar as something I would need to know to treat them somehow. Like if Iām trying to flirt with someone, and if I was a man, and that person I find out is a a lesbian, then I wouldnāt. But if theyāre bi or if theyāre pan, it doesnāt change that.
There is a difference, Iām not saying there isnāt, and Iām not saying we should only use one if the two. Iām just saying the need for clarifying is overblown. If Iām curious why they picked one over the other, I might ask, but again, itās not super critical for anything.
But is there really a difference, then? Both words communicate the same thing, i.e. being attracted to multiple genders. Anything beyond that is so subjective as to not really be meaningful beyond prescriptive queer discourse.
Whatās the alternative youāre suggesting? That they donāt use the label that best suits them? That they donāt use the definition they prefer when asked why they identify as they do? This feels sort of half baked. I get where youāre going, but to what end? Suggesting they use a different definition or a different label just for convenience is pretty problematic.