Bisexuality and Pansexuality – Why is there a war?

If you are part of the community or just very informed(good for you^^) you have heard of the two words “Bisexual” and “Pansexual” and you might also have heard about the “war” that’s going on between them. If you have no idea what I am talking about, or you know the topic, but don’t understand it fully, this post might be for you. I am trying to describe the problems that the community is facing from the perspective of a bisexual woman. I by no means want to say I know everything and what I say is law, it’s just how I understand the situation and my opinion on the subject.

Let’s start by talking about why labels are so important for so many people, using the Acronym for the community as a whole. Most commonly knows as LGBTQ (I don’t think I need to explain the first few letters and what they stand for) the Q can stands for either queer as a general term or questioning, as in you know you are not straight but you have not found the right term for yourself yet. But there is also the acronym LGBTQ+, LGBTQQAI, and even longer versions. Basically, it’s just letters that represent certain sexualities, relationship forms, or identities and it’s getting longer and longer every year because new terms are coming up. I have decided to use the term LGBTQ+ because it includes the founding members of the communities rights movement, queer to incorporate whoever does not want to pick a certain label, and the “+” for acknowledging that there are many more terms that belong to the community, but I don’t want to write out 20 letters or more every time I talk about the it. So for me, it’s a good way to represent everyone, but for someone who let’s say is asexual, it might not be, since their letters are not part of it, visibility. So they might use LGBTQA+ or something entirely different. It’s hard to say what’s right because that can differ from person to person and the same goes for the terms bi- and pansexuality, or does it not?

I will start to talk about the history of the word bisexual very briefly, not only because I identify as such, but also because it just exists longer. And when I say that, I mean that the word was mentioned first in the year 1892, where keep in mind we did not have many of the other words we use today, like transsexual or non-binary for example. But as far as I know it was not used to say you are interested in “both” genders. Yes at that time they might have talked about only two since most people were only aware of two, but “two” was never in the definition, to begin with. It was just a term used to say you were neither only interested in your own gender nor other ones, but both at the same time. And most bisexual people I know, still use this definition today, including myself.

Pansexual seems to have come up as a term with the rise of the internet, but it was also used way back in the past. It was first mentioned in the early 20st century but in a completely different way of how we use it today. I think as a term it really came together with the emerge of the pansexual pride flag in 2010. The colors pink, yellow, and blue are supposed to stand for the different gender Identities we had labels for at that time and being attracted to all of them. So the way I understand it, as trying to be different from the already existing word bisexual, they wanted to get away from the “binary thinking” and acknowledged that there are other identities too. The problem with that is, that the term bisexual already did that too.

The way I see the bisexual pride flag and many other bisexual people do too is that the blue stands for male read people(trans or cisgender), the pink stands for female read people(again, trans or cisgender), and the purple in the middle is a mixture between that, so for me, that also includes everything in-between and also people who don’t want to identify with those genders at all. Some people also say that the blue stands for the attraction to your own gender, where as the pink stands for the attraction to other genders and the purple means that it’s not always 50/50 but still is a mixture between those two attractions. For me both of these interpretations lead to the same conclusion: You see, even if the word bisexual might have had any binary meaning in the past, like many other words in our language it has evolved beyond that.

Let’s take a little digression and talk about the womxn/womyn debate. I try to keep it short. There was a feminist group that did not like that there was the word “men” in the word “women” so they decided they need to change it somehow. So they thought of replacing the “e” with an “x”, still the same pronunciation, but no “men” included anymore, literally. Because those feminists were very radical and they said only “real” women (meaning cisgender women) should be allowed to use the term.
This of course was very exclusive and offense, so another less radical feminist group came up with the idea of replacing the letter yet again, creating the word “womyn”, still the same pronunciation, but this time they allowed ALL women to use it, transgender and cisgender alike. I do get why that needed to be done, because the first word was obviously made with not-so-good intentions, so they had to replace it to make it inclusive again.
Now I feel that is very reminiscent of how the debate between pansexual and bisexual people goes along. It really feels sometimes as if they think we are like the “womxn” people and they needed to come in and be the “womyn” people, but that’s just not the case.

And that actually leads to the biggest problem I have with part of the pansexual community, which is that they are trying to replace the term bisexuality with the term pansexuality completly, to be “more modern”. And that feels wrong to me on so many levels. It feels like they are trying to explain our sexuality to us, make it look bad and then try to make us use the term they use, even though it might not feel right for many people. They are also trying to erase the history and activisms work, maybe not on purpose, but that’s what would come out of replacing the word too. Of course not all pansexuals do that! And I guess, I get it, to some extent. Because if we look at it the way I explained it, those are two words for the same thing and I guess that’s where this thought of “war” is coming from: The two terms and maybe even the two communities fight for their existence.

Sadly I can’t provide a solution to this problem, other than trying to ignore the fact that both terms are basically discribing the same thing and tring to kinda not talk about it? But I don’t think that would be something we could hold up for long. I don’t want to say one term is better than the other and I totally get wanting to be inclusive, that’s always a great thing. I just don’t think coming up with a new word would have been nessesary in the first place.
I always like to think, that someone just interpreted the term “bisexuality” wrong and than went out and told his friends about it, being angered by how excluvie it sounded and coming up with their own “better” term. So I thought if we can provide the right explanation, the need for other word would just vanish. But I think at this point it has gone beyong this possible missunderstanding, which lead us to this “war” inside of the community.
I hope one day we can come to some kind of understanding, however that might look like then. Because as a community we should not only fight together, rather than fighting each other, but we also have problems in society still to face. And I think we should not get distracted from that, by analysing what seems to be “problematic” about each other and the concepts about our identies.

Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress