this might be weird to ask but do you have any sources or references of why you are confident that pansexual people can have gender preferences / other people saying so? There's not one Big Pan Council that decides these things but popular usage generally determines the meaning of a word and I've seen a lot of usage lately and defense of "being pansexual requires not having a preference" which I disagree with and would like more concrete evidence isn't true if possible
uh my sources and “concrete evidence” are pan people, but i’m guessing that’s not what you mean. because that’s never what people mean, because apparently pan people don’t get to decide what their own identity means or can mean. but that’s why i’m confident. because there are pan people who have preferences. because pan can mean different things to different people. because pan means all. because pan doesn’t mean “not having a preference”. no matter how many believe that to be the case.
and if we’re talking popular usage, the most commonly used definition of pan (which is “regardless of gender”) isn’t about not having gender preferences. it’s about gender not determining attraction. determining, not affecting. gender can affect the how much and type of attraction, while not determining whether the attraction is there.
but regardless, popular usage isn’t what determines the meaning of queer terms. because in that case, bi would mean two, more specifically men and women. ace would mean not liking/having sex. because those are the most popular, common understandings of bi and ace.but that doesn’t make them accurate. that doesn’t mean people need to provide proof that that is not what they mean.
i’m sorry if i sound defensive or angry. it’s just annoying how people accept that the bi community altered the meaning of their identity, no questions asked, they have every right to do so and everyone has to listen to what they say. but when pan people are like “hey our identity means this, not that” people ask for our sources, as if the people in this community with this identity don’t get a say in what defines that identity, as if our feelings and experiences with and how we relate to this identity don’t matter.
if you’re looking for sources, as in “official” articles or ~manifestos from the 90s or whatever, good luck to you. because pan history is not something that is readily available. everything we know about pan comes from people within the queer community telling and retelling stories, and pan people building on from there.
we don’t have books and studies and surveys and articles and networks and organizations that are well established and date back decades, because pan was not that widely known and therefor not widely documented. we just have ourselves building a community and identity on top of the very little information we’ve been able to scrounge up.
sorry if this doesn’t help you.
