As a biromantic asexual woman, I refer to myself as bi or pan interchangeably.
When I looked at the definitions and using my background knowledge, it appears that both sexualities love regardless of gender.
While bisexual people like men and women, I also heard that very few of them won’t date other genders. Some bi people will only date cis men and women, others only men and women in general, and some will date nonbinary people and not care.
So anyway, don’t both sexualities love regardless of gender and find everyone attractive?
I refer to myself as pan for two reasons. First, I believe that gender is a spectrum and there’s more than two of them. Two, to me bisexual implies equal attraction to both the masculine and feminine, and I’m less attracted to the masculine than I am to the feminine end of the scale.
Really, pansexual is being attracted to the the person, regardless of their gender identity.
Echoing other lemmings, there’s basically no difference. There js a certain niche who seem to think that pansexual is more trans inclusive, but that attitude doesn’t align with almost all bisexuals opinions on the matter, or with the history of how the bisexual community has been accepting and collaborating with the trans community since pretty much the birth of both communities.
The delightful verilybitchie, who is both bisexual and trans, has a bunch of good video on the history of bisexuality, trans stuff, and biphobia*. They are defintely worth watching!
/* it’s pretty hard to hear ‘bisexuals exclude trans people’ and not feel like that’s an example of biphobia.
One woman told me that she identifies as bisexual, even though she is attracted to all genders including non-binary, because she has two “modes” of dating. When dating women, she prefers to be the pursuer. When dating men, she prefers to be the pursued. I’m not sure which way she usually went with enbies.
This is so far over my head - i don’t understand it. I know my comment will likely be taken as offensive or condescending, but it’s really not the intent. I am so confused by sexuality/gender discussions. I don’t understand having a label that’s inclusive or exclusive of who someone will or won’t date. Doesn’t that change based on the people you meet? If you label one way, you meet someone you find attractive, you have chemistry, and then you find that they have parts that don’t fit your label, what do you do? I guess it’s part of dating - to weed out what you’re usually not attracted to? I partnered/married young, so that aspect of dating wasn’t openly discussed in the same way- we didn’t have the common words to describe like we have today. Also, being hetero and having mostly hetero friends, i guess we didn’t spend time thinking about how our relationships were similar or different from each others. I definitely understand putting descriptions of any kind of love out there so young people know they’re not alone, but beyond that I’m lost.
