You’ve met someone interesting, whether in real life or through online dating, and they say they’re a pansexual.
What do you do?
First things first. Just because you don’t understand what a pansexual is doesn’t mean it’s something to be offended about. Do not ever turn away from someone just because they’re talking about something you don’t understand.
Okay? Okay. Now that we’re clear on that. Here’s what you need to do.
Do not panic. It’s okay if you don’t know what being a pansexual is. It’s a relatively new term for most people. And many people who don’t usually date other people simply because they’re attracted to who they are and not because of their genders are too shy to admit they don’t know the answer to the question “What is a pansexual person?”
Instead, all you can do is to educate yourself. Ask. Learn. Put yourself in the shoes of others so you get a better idea of what they experience. The next time someone else is brave enough to ask you “What does pansexual mean?” you’ll be able to teach them what you know.
What’s a Pansexual?
A lot of people define love as something we feel for the opposite sex. But the pansexual definition for love goes way beyond that. For pansexuals, they experience love that transcends the boundaries of sex and gender. They don’t care if someone they love is a man, woman, transgender, or something else. Just take a look at the prefix “pan”. It’s a Greek word that means “all”, meaning pansexuals can love anybody of all genders because they don’t look at gender at all.
Pansexuals can love someone who feels like a man one day and a woman the next. If you don’t feel like being a man or a woman, pansexuals have no problem with that. They can also love people who don’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth and people who feel like none of the known genders fit their sense of self. And they can also love cisgenders, or someone you’d call heterosexual or “straight”.
There’s no limit to who and what pansexuals can love. They take a look at how you smile, how you brush a lock of hair from your temple, how you freely give your time to someone who can’t give back – and bam! – they’re hooked.
What Does it Mean to Be Pansexual?
There’s really no way of grasping what it’s like to be a pansexual. It’s not like you can open the dictionary and get an exact definition for the word “pansexual” in the same way you get an exact definition for the word “mugwort”. Unless you identify as pansexual yourself, there’s no way of truly knowing what it’s like to be one.
Some pansexuals believe it’s the purest, most natural form of living. You don’t concern yourself with little things such as people’s gender. In the grand scheme of things, gender has got nothing to do with anything. You’re attracted to the energy people have, not to their gender.
Being a pansexual, or even just exploring what it means, helps you open yourself up to the world and love other people more in both sexual and non-sexual ways.
Myths about Being Pansexual
Anything that people don’t understand is surrounded by a lot of myths and misconceptions.
For example, being a pansexual doesn’t mean you’re attracted to all persons, creatures, and objects that are without a doubt off-limits. It doesn’t mean you’re a zoophile or a pedophile.
Look, just because someone can be attracted to anyone regardless of their gender doesn’t mean they also get off on fat-tailed sheep, ancient marble statues, or most disturbingly, six-year-old ginger-hair boys.
It also doesn’t mean that you’re attracted to everyone and want to have sex with all of them at the same time. No, being a pansexual doesn’t make you a hornbag who thinks about having sex with everyone all the time. None of that has anything to do with pansexuality at all.
Pansexual vs. Bisexual: What’s the Difference
In many ways, pansexuality and bisexuality are the same. But they’re also very different in nuanced ways that you might not be able to recognize at first.
Bisexual is the B in LGBTQ. The term itself has always played a meaningful role in the continuing fight for gender equality. Most of us are familiar with what being bi means. A bi person is someone who likes men and women.
Using this bisexual definition, some people argue that bisexuality promotes the gender binary. You’re either a man or a woman. That’s it. It’s an idea that gender equality activists have been campaigning to scrap for the longest time.
The truth is some people can identify as both man and woman. Some people also identify as neither man nor woman but a different gender altogether. This is why some people have come up with a new word that more accurately encapsulates what they feel.
Pansexuality takes the idea of binary genders and chucks it out the window. That’s the main difference between bi and pan. It doesn’t mean bi people aren’t accepting of or open to being attracted to people of other genders aside from man and woman. Language, after all, is always changing. And that includes the language of sex and gender.
In fact, many bisexuals have made statements about how they’re attracted to people of more than one sex and/or gender. In this case, the “bi” stands for “genders like mine” and “genders different from mine”.
So here’s the big question. Can you be bi and pan at the same time? Of course. You can be anything you want.
Takeaway
Does all this feel like one huge head-scratcher to you? Do you feel like all these labels for other people’s gender identities and expressions aren’t enough to represent the complex notions that lie beneath? Don’t worry. It can get confusing for us too. The important thing is for you to be able to explore and understand your sexuality and allow others to do the same for themselves.
