Happy pan visibility day! 🩷💛🩵
Due to some queer accounts on Instagram posting about celebrations of today, I had to get reminded that there are still some awful queer people focusing on discourse about that "bi vs. pan" shit.
There is a tendency for battle-axe bisexuals to state that "bisexual and pansexual mean the exact same thing" with the intent of equating the two because they want to invalidate anyone who identifies as pansexual instead of just identifying as bisexual, but I realized something... this is actually biphobic as hell, not bi-affirming like they think!
Of course, sexual orientation labels are neologisms for a person's own comfort, so being linguistically prescriptivist about them at all is absolute nonsense that anyone who perpetuates this "bi vs. pan" shit doesn't understand.
However, to illustrate my point coherently, a common definition of "pansexual" is a sexual orientation which entails not regarding gender in your attraction. If a battle-axe bisexual asserts something like "Well, bisexuality means not regarding gender too!", then they are literally invalidating every fucking bisexual person that regards gender in their attraction (and there are tons of those). There are many bisexual people who will explicitly say that they regard gender.
To grasp at straws so hard to invalidate people who identify as pansexual that you'll shit out a misconceived biphobic myth that invalidates numerous bisexual people is basically saying "being indirectly biphobic to own the goofy MOGAI pans."
I identify as both bisexual and pansexual simultaneously, so every time this kind of discourse comes up, especially when people have the intent to put bisexuality and pansexuality as "at war" with each other makes me double facepalm.
No one should invalidate anyone's identity. No one should invalidate their own personal interpretation of it. Pansexual people should respect how bisexual people identify themselves. Bisexual people should respect how pansexual people identify themselves. Everyone should just respect other people's labels PERIOD!
Bottom line is that the LGBTQ+ community needs to get over label discourse and policing entirely. You'd think "respect people in how they personally identify" wouldn't be a controversial take for queer people BUT... here we are.
Love all of my m-spec buddies, BTW!
It's honestly the same energy as transmeds/enbyphobic trans people who say ambiguous shit like "Non-binary' and 'trans' are different!", but it's in the opposite direction. Whereas the trans example tries to separate non-binary and trans people by using disingenuous phrasing equivalent to saying "Dogs and mammals are different!," the "Pansexual and bisexual mean the same thing!" take does the same thing (invalidation) but with an opposite approach: conflating the labels for the sake of invalidating their differences as opposed to separating them for the sake of invalidating their similarities. I guess, in their case, the "Pansexual' and 'bisexual' mean the same thing!" take would be analogous to saying "Golden retrievers and dogs are the same thing!"
However, in both instances, the words are very similar and fall under the same umbrella, but they have their own differences. Still, non-binary people are trans, just not binary trans, and still, pansexual people can have overlap with many bisexual people but, by definition, not all bisexual people fit being pansexual.