I’m a bisexual woman, and both I and my bi friends include trans and non-binary people in our attraction range. What are the difference between the terms?
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Bisexuality and pansexuality are functionally the same thing – you’re capable of being attracted in some capacity to both men and women (although because of the complexities of sex, gender and attraction, that could manifest in a variety of forms). This is opposed to straight and gay people, who are attracted in some way or other to one sex and/or gender, but in no way at all to the other. The simplest terms would just be penises and vaginas, but obviously that’s really reductive and misses out so much.
Pansexual is a term that some bisexual people choose to use to describe themselves, and they may choose to do this for a variety of reasons. Some pansexual people choose the term because they feel that the word bisexual has too strong implications of the sexual or gender binary mattering – as seen in the fact my description above struggled to account for the fact that not all people actually fit neatly into the categories of male or female, and can be attractive to someone regardless of genitalia. These people wish to reject the binary in regard to their capacity for attraction to other humans.
Other people use the word pansexual because they wish to distinguish between people who are attracted to specifically two genders (“bi”sexual people) and people who are attracted to all genders (“pan”sexual people). That one of course is dependent on the belief that there are more than two genders, and on defining bisexual as specifically meaning attraction to two genders, which obviously isn’t how all bisexual people use the term.
Some pansexual people choose the term because to them, gender and/or sex is completely irrelevant. These people typically contrast bisexuality and pansexuality on the idea that while bisexuals can be attracted to a range of people, that attraction is related to sex and/or gender, whereas for pansexuals it doesn’t matter at all. To give an example, I have a bisexual friend who is attracted specifically to masculine-presenting men and feminine-presenting women, but not feminine-presenting men or masculine-presenting women – in this case, sex matters to her sexuality because what she finds attractive depends on the sex of the person. Hypothetically, someone attracted to feminine men and women but not masculine men and women would be someone for whom gender expression matters (ie feminine good) but not sex (because that feminine works the same on both sexes).
So, the difference between pansexuality and bisexuality really depends on who you ask: To have a difference, someone needs to first define bisexuality as something more narrow than being attracted to both sexes, and then determine that their sexuality is less narrow than that definition of bisexuality they’ve come up with.
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