My Problems With Pansexual

The term "pansexual" is cropping up more and more, both online and off.  I've gotten in some pretty heated discussions about the term.  For those unfamiliar, the idea behind pansexual is that it defines an identity in which a person has the capacity to be attracted to all genders, or any form of gender expression.  Hey, cool.  The problem is that when questioned about it, 9 times out of 10, it seems a pansexual-identified person will define it in opposition to bisexuality, and it goes a little something like this:

"Bisexual means you're only attracted to men or women, but pansexual means you're attracted to transgendered, genderqueer, androgynous, and intersex people."

Cliche record scratch time!

There are two glaring problems with this definition of pansexuality.  The first is that it "third-genders" or "other genders" all trans people, by defining them as not men or not women, but something else - a nebulous third category.  While there are plenty of people who identify as trans who also identify as genderqueer or outside a gender binary, there are also many, many trans people who find this other-gendering to be extremely invalidating and offensive.   I've been told I'm "reading this into" pansexuality but if you do a quick Google search on pansexual definitions, defining trans people as automatically outside "man" or "woman" comes up over and over and over again.  Not cool.

The other problem is that it incorrectly defines the attractions of people who consider themselves bisexual.  For a long time, and for many to this day, "bisexual" is a sort of catch-all term that encompasses anything inbetween "straight" or "gay". It was a term created in a time where notions of genderqueerness didn't really exist, nor did people spend a lot of time differentiating between the biological concept of "sex" versus the social idea of "gender."  However, the term stuck, and became useful as both a personal and political identity.

This does not mean that all or even most people who identify as "bisexual" are invested or only believe in a gender binary or that they are only attracted to cisgendered people, and it is actually pretty fucking offensive to suggest otherwise.  Most people would agree that an acceptable modern definition of "bisexual" means "attracted to more than one gender." 

"But 'bi' is in the title!  It must mean two!" 

That's just facile, overly-literal interpretation that serves little purpose.  For the most part, the definitions of "bisexual" and "pansexual" can and are the same.  Some people choose "bisexual" because it's the word the heard first, because it's more commonly accepted than "pansexual", because they feel it already has a political or social movement behind it.  Some people choose pansexual because they feel it's more inclusive, or it better describes them, or because they want to emphasize being especially attracted to people who fall outside a gender binary.  And that's all cool.  It's not cool to pit the terms against each other in an attempt to define other people's orientation.  I'd say the same applies to "omni" or "ambi" (both less common than pansexual, but both also used). 

Identity is complicated enough without drawing artificial boundaries around "bi" because you're stuck in a binary way of thinking yourself.  Identification markers serve as shorthand and aren't always going to be able to fully encompass the complexities of a person's attractions and behavior in a single word, so why try?  Aside from the terminology, as bi/pan/omni/flexible/whatever people we have bigger fish to fry - like the assholes who say we don't exist in the first place - to spend time shitting on people who are in the same boat you are.