Bisexuality and pansexuality are two identities that often confuse people. Both those inside and outside the LGBTQIA+ community often don’t understand what the terms mean and why the distinction between them matters.
And I’m definitely not an exception. I’ve known I was bi since I was about 15 or 16, and only recently did I finally start to truly understand these identities. That’s mostly due to other lovely members of the community educating me on the subject, so I thought that maybe I could spread the love a little bit and explain the difference between bisexuality and pansexuality, and clear up some misconceptions about the labels.
Bisexuality has traditionally been thought of as “attraction to both men and women,” but that’s super dumb. Gender is much more complicated than “you’re either a dude or a lady,” and the exclusion of nonbinary people from the definition doesn’t make sense because they can be so diverse in their gendered presentation. The most functional definition of bisexuality is “attraction to two or more genders.” This definition recognizes that gender is often a major factor in a bisexual person’s attraction to another person.
This leads me into another misconception about bisexuality: it isn’t some weird state of being half straight, half gay. Bisexual people are often more drawn to one gendered presentation over another. For me, that means being attracted to feminine-presenting people by a much wider margin than masculine-presenting people.
The main difference between bisexuality and pansexuality is that the latter does not make this distinction. Pansexuality can be defined as “attraction to people regardless of their gender.” Basically, gender identity has no bearing on a pansexual person’s attraction to someone else, and therefore they will not be more or less attracted to someone based on gender.
I hope that clears up some misconceptions! I’m not pan, so it’s important that you take my perspective with a grain of salt, since I will never understand pansexuality as completely as a pan person could. The bottom line here is that there is a wide overlap between these two identities, but the distinction matters.