I promise I'm coming from a place of genuine curiosity and I'm not trying to start anything. Why is "hearts not parts" problematic?
So when "hearts not parts" became a popular saying, it was intended to explain that pansexual people don't care about gender and are instead attracted to who people are. It was a simplified way to explain we are attracted to all genders without having to go into a bunch of stuff about how more than 2 genders exist and how is this different from bi and bla bla bla.
Admittedly, I don't know much about the history of the phrase or when it was coined. I've only seen it used once in my whole life when I was probably like 17 or something, and someone explained to me how it was problematic then so I never used it and I haven't seen anyone actually use it since then. It died out in popularity, probably because people realized it was bad.
So why is it bad? Well, a few reasons:
- "Parts" in this phrase refer to genitalia. It's essentially equating gender to genitalia, which is offensive to transgender, nonbinary, and arguably intersex people. It's basically saying your gender is determined completely by your assigned sex at birth.
- "Hearts," on the other hand, was meant to refer to personality. So the phrase implies that only pansexual people care about personality, while other orientations care only about what genitalia someone has.
- To me, there is also an implication that pansexuals don't care about gender at all, either meaning we don't have gender preferences or that we don't think other people's genders are important. The first is simply inaccurate for many pan people and the second is insulting because people's genders matter to them and deserve to be respected, and people deserve to be seen as the gender they are.
And there are probably things I am missing here, but those are the big and obvious ones.
Today, many people who hate or are prejudiced against pansexual people use "Hearts not Parts" as a justification. They claim that this phrase proves pan people are prejudiced against other orientations and against trans and nonbinary people, which they feel makes it okay to be prejudiced against us in return. A huge part of the belief that pan people are automatically biphobic and transphobic comes from the fact this phrase used to be popular with us.
(I mean, there are other things that make them assume that too, but this phrase is a big part of that.)
The reason I brought it up in my little pansexuality slide show thing was because a lot of people seem to think pan people still almost all use this phrase regularly and either don't care or don't know that it's problematic. But most of us don't use it and most of us find it offensive too; the few of us who don't know it's offensive have just never been educated on it and probably aren't purposely being a bigot, you know?
I heard from somewhere that bisexual panphobes have recently been trying to "reclaim" the phrase. I haven't seen this for myself, but I hope it's not true because it's a bad phrase and needs to be left in the past.
@posi-pan can probably tell you more about this phrase than I can if you still have questions.
Hope this helps!
Love always, Adelaide
