â ïžLong Post Ahead!!
 Iâve seen a lot of blogs about the whole pansexual vs bisexual debate and pansexual and bisexual solidarity floating around so I wanted to share my thoughts and experience with both labels. (Both as a vent and to show how confusing and nonsensical sexuality + gender can be)Â
TLTR: Labels are entirely made up by people as a way to explain to others what they feel/donât feel and to explain how they wanât others to refer to them. This means that labels are entirely personal to each individual person and their definitions can change overtime. We cannot hate/judge people because they use a label that in the past had a negative definition and now has a positive one, and we cannot hate/judge people for creating new more specific ones. On the flip side, we cannot expect people to understand and comprehend every label so we need to do the best to educate and inform people about them!
Now for the long part! (you can ask me questions ab this if you wish to):
  The first non-monosexual label I came across was bisexual, which was due to my mother who is bisexual. I was in 6th grade at the time and was beginning to learn more about the LGBTQ+ and, simultaneously, myself. As a young kid I never tried to influence who I was (ex: act girly), but I believed that a label placed upon you couldnât be changed. I thought that my gender was dictated on what I was assigned as from birth- which stemmed from the lack of education on what transgender was, and I also thought since I was a girl I HAD to like boys. Even when I found out about other sexualities I had a hard time shaking off my âresponsibilityâ to like men, which didnât feel like a burden since I did and still like mostly men. The only times it really affected me was when I developed crushes on girls, but fantasized those girls turning into boys because for some reason I just didnât realize I could like women? I still liked their personalities and I thought they looked pretty- but I couldnât POSSIBLY like and date a girl. Eventually I accepted that I could like women, and adopted the bi label. During that time I had also adopted the genderfluid label, but my view point on gender was just fueled on how I liked to dress and act.
 Like most kids in my generation, I also had a lack of internet supervision. This led to some⊠interesting⊠experiences. I might have been groomed, but for the most part I just met kids my age who, like me, were stupid and didnât understand a thing about what a crush actually was. In my head, if I wanted to spend a lot of time with someone I had a crush on them. Me and a lot of my online friends also would roleplay so our idea of a relationship had to be both cute and dramatic, which is unhealthy and not realistic at all. I think I had gotten into 3 ârelationshipsâ before I actually, somewhat, developed a real crush on someone. I eventually opened up to that person, and that person also liked me, so we ended up dating. Our relationship was very toxic, mainly because we were very co-dependant, so young, and didnât understand setting boundaries and saying things like âplease donât leave me or iâll do blankâ wasnât a healthy thing despite feeling like it was true. Nonetheless that person taught me a lot and introduced me to two new labels, pansexuality and nonbinary. They themselves were nonbinary and pansexual and taught me about it. The definition I got for both labels werenât exactly fully true. Pansexuality was like bisexuality but you also liked nonbinary people and nonbinary was just a mix of being a woman and a man. At the time I thought I fit these definitions because a) I never felt like my gender identity was fluid, but rather a mix of female and male (again, still based off of how I acted and dressed), and b) I liked that person at the time, who was nonbinary, so I liked women, men, and nonbinary people.Â
 Eventually I found out that nonbinary was actually an umbrella term where everyone experiences gender differently, and I also found out that pansexuality was like bisexuality but you just didnât have a preference. As I grew I still identified as pansexuality, despite the change in definition. I think this was because I was so desperate to be in a relationship and felt like I âneededâ one (a view point which is soooo unhealthy and ruined a lot of my relationships, plus led to me being used), so I just really didnât care about what gender the person was. I also developed my first actual in person crushes, one of them identified as a woman at the time and the other one is agender. It was through them that I actually started to question what kind of person I was looking for and through getting in a relationship with the agender person I learned whatâs healthy and whatâs not healthy. Eventually I started to create boundaries and often visualized what my ideal partner would be, which also led to me realizing that almost every time I visualized a guy. I also experimented with different gender identities, ranging from transgender, to agender, to demiboy, to eventually not giving a flying fck about what label I used and focusing on learning about how I felt about myself. I also realized that gender isnât based on how you dress or act.
 Even to this day I describe my gender as a mix of the lack of one and a guy, more specifically the amount of how much I feel like a guy fluctuates between no gender and a âhalf guy.â I also learned that labels are just a way to convey a feeling or lack of a feeling, which often has rules attached to them to both use against/control people and to communicate how you wanât people to refer to you. So while labels are hella useful we cannot use them to define other people, thats when they become harmful. Labels are also constantly changing because theyâre different for everyone. We canât get mad at someone because they use a certain label that in the past had a negative meaning but now has a positive one. Ex: Pansexuality, which many people try to argue against bc people use to use it in transphobic ways (excluding all transgender people as a third gender, as if transwomen arenât real woman). We also canât exactly control how people define their own labels, or control which ones they use. Some people view pansexuality as the lack of a preference in gender, and some people view pansexuality as just liking all genders. Some people also use other similar labels and ânonsensicalâ ones to describe their sexuality/gender or lack of it. You canât get mad at them because they are using labels the way theyâre supposed to be used, to describe to other people what you feel you are/arenât!! Since all of this depends on feelings, sometimes gender/sexuality is non-static. Sometimes people switch labels because they donât fit anymore or because they realized they never were that label to begin with. For better explanation, if you know someone who use to identify as lesbian but now identifies as pansexual (or vice versa), either that person just realized they like more than just women or at one point they only liked women but now like more than just women. Yes it can be confusing at thats why some people donât get it right. Thats also why a lot of labels get push back, because people donât understand it. We need to listen to each other more!!! The only time a label isnât valid is when it is used to justify the harm a person does to others (ex: pedophiles and zoophiles).
  After realizing this I actually switched back to using the label bisexual, but my use of pansexual was still valid. I do believe at one point I didnât have a gender preference, but my viewpoint on love has drastically changed and therefore sexuality has changed. While fundamentally I like people for who they are, when I talk about my ideal partner I usually do lean towards more masculine identifying people. I seek out more masculine people, but my feelings for people donât just develop because the person is masculine, they develop because I grow close to that person for who they are.
