this is a long post about pan discourse so skip to the end if you want a tl;dr
first, i want to say that i am NOT the identity police. i don’t really give a shit what people identify as. if you want to identify as pepsisexual go right ahead. but don’t claim oppression for it.
i think it’s important to say right off the bat that some identities are born of the wrong reasons. a really good example of this that isn’t pansexuality (which i will discuss in a second) is the term lithsexual/lithromantic, which is a mogai identity that basically sexualises a result of abuse. there are other posts on this; i’m not going into it. this post is about pansexuality, but i wanted to give an example of another bad orientation.
okay. about pansexuality. i am of the opinion that this orientation is both biphobic and transphobic. “but pan means you’ll date anyone!!!! even trans people!!!!” yeah. that’s the problem. if you take a look at the history of bisexuality in the lgbt community, you’ll see that bisexuality has always meant the attraction to everyone. not just “men and women”. so saying that pansexuality means the attraction to everyone, and bisexuality only means attraction to “men and women” or “only two genders” is biphobic & transphobic. on top of that, it heavily implies that bisexuality is transphobic. which is not true. bisexual people have always loved everyone. creating a new term because “i’ll date the transes too!!!” is transphobic and disgusting. stop putting bi people through the wringer. we already include everyone in our orientation.
cis people using the term pansexuality also makes me incredibly uncomfortable. i dislike the term in general, but ESPECIALLY when cis people use it. because cis people don’t have the full understanding of nonbinary gender identities or what it’s like to be transgender. so they use pansexuality the way i described it above, as in “i’ll date men and women, and even trans people! (: ”. i don’t think i have to explain why this is transphobic.
my last point is a personal note that i think is relevant to this. when i was first figuring out my identity, i started off with bisexuality. but i had a constant nagging thought in my head that told me i should identify as pansexual, because i would date a person of any gender. the same thought told me that identifying as bisexual was regressive and didn’t include everyone. these were both sentiments i got from tumblr.
that kind of internalised biphobia is not something i’m proud of, and i’m really glad that i was able to move forward and realise that yeah, i’m bisexual. and i’m really proud to be bisexual. because bisexuality includes everyone already.
tl;dr: pansexuality is an irrelevant and harmful term, because the history of bisexuality tells us that it already meant the attraction to all genders.
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