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 agree with this, and I’m a pansexual non-binary person. A lot of people think that my pansexual identity (or pansexual identity as a whole) is rooted in signalling that I factor in non-binary people (or even trans people as a whole) in my attraction when this isn’t at all the reason why I identify as pansexual. I merely use the term “pansexual” to say I don’t regard gender into my preferences. I personally believe that it’s not weird for people of any sexual orientation (barring asexuality because aces do not experience sexual attraction), be them gay, straight, bi, or pan, to find non-binary people attractive because enbies are such a diverse and varied group of individuals and don’t have a set manifestation of their gender like people would envision binary men and women having. This means that saying something like “I’m not into non-binary people” could be rooted in a generalization or misunderstanding of enbies, but I wouldn’t be upset at someone saying that necessarily as long as they’re not explicitly enbyphobic in the process. These kinds of intricacies are exactly why I always say that you can’t conjure up prescriptive rulesets for sexual orientations, and it’s best to let people decide for themselves which label they vibe with the most from their own personal standpoint.