#basically new terms are good shitting on old terms is generally bsd

[vamptastic]

i'm very far past arguing about it anymore but i still think the term pansexual is stupid. it'd be one thing if it was a simple reworking of the term to have more accurate etymology, like phasing out transsexual and transvestite in favor of transgender and gender non-conforming. you should still let people use the old term if they want, but coming up with a new one that conveys the meaning more precisely is fine.

but instead it seemed to be suggested as an entirely newly coined thing of its own. which is ridiculous, because it means the exact same thing that the term bisexual has meant for as long as the word has existed- being attracted to men, women, and people of other genders. and of course it implies that bisexual people have a sexuality exclusive of nonbinary people, which obviously has just never been the case, beyond individual bigots. if i call a historical figure bisexual, i generally mean they expressed attraction to men and to women at the same time, OR that they dated someone of an indeterminate gender, OR sometimes that they continued a romantic relationship with somebody through a gender transition. like, that's what the term means, it is identical to pansexuality in terms of who you might actually date or have sex with.

the only place where the terms ever diverge is that sometimes people say bisexuals are attracted to people with gender as a component, so, say someone who is only into a specific type of woman and a specific type of man. while a pansexual would date lots of different sorts of people within the male and female gender, or one type of person across multiple genders. but that's retroactively applying a new definition to bisexual than how people used it before. it's nicer than saying that bisexuality must actually mean bigotry due to its etymology, but it's still using an inaccurate definition that nobody has ever used until you decided it meant that.

basically i think the term was created because bisexual history is difficult to research and most people are entirely unaware that it even exists to be read about in the first place. so instead, people looked at the most literal etymological meaning of the term and decided that definitely must be what people mean when they say bisexual, so let's invent a new sexuality that includes more than two genders.

some people call themselves pansexual because they just like how the word sounds better, which is fine. i also don't care about stuff like omnisexual multisexual etc, it's true that bisexual has a misleading etymology. but generally when i ask somebody why they prefer that term they misdefine bisexuality to explain it. and that greatly frustrates me, because it is not particularly difficult to find writing from the 70s where bisexuality is clearly defined. it's like saying lesbians need to call themselves femalesexual because the root of the word implies they're from the island of lesbos. it's stupid.

basically i don't care what you call yourself, but don't misrepresent what another term means to justify it, just because you don't know anything about bisexual history.