this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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To be fair, pansexuality is under the umbrella of bisexuality. What makes it more confusing is that there is no rule saying that bisexuals must only be attracted to 2 genders. Nor is there a rule stating that a bisexual must care about the gender of their partner.
Edit: bisexual is a very old term, but it does not strictly refer to only two genders.
Doesn't the name imply only two?
No it implies once every other week
Wait
Or twice a week?
Well then what's semisexual?? I'll never get this figured out
Shit, that's the rough life. I'll take the twice a week definition instead please, Trebek.
The "bi" is for both homosexual and heterosexual relations. Not gender itself.
TIL
Sure but it can be interpreted as "people who share my gender" and "people who do not share my gender."
This is off-topic, but... For some reason, that reminded me of a funny exchange I had with someone who was buying a lottery ticket, years ago...
Me: "What are the chances that you'll win?"
Him, with a heavy southern (US) accent: "50/50. You either win or you don't."
It does, but definitions often diverge from the original over time
That's because it's an extremely old term; it merely refers to someone who is attracted to more than one gender.
Actually it originally refers to having two sexes. Aka hermaphroditic.
I really hate how the word “sexual” has evolved in meaning into “relating to the activity that evolved to happen between the two main sexes”. We have the perfectly good Greek root “ero” and for some reason we have gradually muddled up the meaning of “sexual”.
In plants*
Ok but did we really need yet another term that is difficult to distinguish from pre-existing terms?
When you have to write an essay to describe it, that should be a clue.
Bisexual is the original term.
A clue to what? That some concepts take more than one second to explain?
As someone who identifies as pansexual, the distinction i make is that I don't consider gender when vetting a potential partner, it's just not a metric that is part of that decision.
Aside from that, your description here is spot on from what I understand at least. Of course gender and sexuality is a social construct so other people may feel differently
Err shouldn't it be the other way around? Ie bisexuality under the umbrella of pan-?
No, not really. Bisexual is older and not enough people can even agree on what pansexuality is. There are people with gender preferences who still identify as pansexual, which kinda distills any point of the word.
Fair enough
I tend to head canon it as binarysexual and pansexual, just as a way to keep them straight (heh) when running through things in thought
That's incorrect though. Bisexual means "homo- and heterosexual" as in, "those that share your gender and those that don't".
Which is the same as pansexual. But pansexual is a term invented by people who didn't understand the above.
That's why I said head canon.
Head canon is where you make shit up for internal entertainment. This being on lemmy, I kinda assumed that even in a science meme community, head canon would be understood. Sorry about that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm dubious if pansexual being invented by people that didn't understand that though. The word pansexual is usually acknowledged as being derived from pansexualism, which was coined whole by or about Freud (supposedly, I wasn't alive then to know) to mean that sex and sexuality are a primary motivation in all human existence.
The later term came around back in the seventies, and was being used to mean having no limits on sexuality. I've run across people saying they used it as far back as the sixties in that context, but they were dirty hippie potheads, sooo...
In any case, it was in use during at least the late seventies, as it showed up in print in some of the books of the era that were part of the sexual revolution. And it didn't "just" mean trans inclusive, nor was it used as a direct synonym for bisexual. It very much included things like what gets called polyamory now, group activity, etc. The core usage was that the person calling themselves pansexual was not limiting themselves to the standard paradigm, which is a different thing from being attracted to and/or having hetero and/or homo sexual activity.
I'm not sure exactly when the term got shifted to the increasingly common usage of "trans inclusive sexual orientation", though I remember running into it as far back as either the late nineties or early oughts.
So, I'm fairly confident that the people back in the sixties or seventies that originated it as something close to an orientation knew that bisexuality existed, and saw pansexual as being something that went beyond it in some way. I've definitely never run across any definitive "first use" where the term was defined in print. Not saying it wasn't, just that none of my reading of the matter back in the day uncovered it, and human sexuality was very present in my mom's collection of books. Our town library even included books on the subject, though less than what my mom had, and way less than I had access to later on.
With that in mind, if you have run across something definitive regarding the origin of the term either in the seventies sense, or its adoption as trans inclusive, I would absolutely love it if you could guide me to it. Not being snarky, not being contrarian, I'd genuinely enjoy learning more about it because it's a subject that's fascinated me since I was old enough to think about sex at all.