Miley Cyrus, Janelle Monae, Brandon Urie, Demi Lovato—these are a few of the celebrities who have, at some point, come out as pansexual. But if you’re asking yourself what pansexuality is exactly, you’re not alone. The term is unfamiliar for lots of people, so, to some, it might seem like vocabulary that’s recently been invented. While pansexuality is definitely being discussed more openly in pop culture, the sexual identity is far from new.
“If I am 1,000% honest, I can’t remember where I first heard the term ‘pansexual,’ but I think it resonated with me specifically after having had a crush on a trans guy in high school,” Koshka K., a 28-year-old pansexual woman who lives in Philadelphia and works as a restaurant server, tells SELF. “At the time, my understanding of bisexuality vs. pansexuality was that bisexuality only addressed attraction to cis men and cis women, whereas pansexuality encompassed everything.”
Clearly, there’s a lot to explore when it comes to understanding what it means to be pansexual! Below, we talked with human sexuality experts to answer your questions about pansexuality and clear up common misconceptions—including how similar it is or isn’t to bisexuality.
What does it mean to be pansexual?
“Pansexual” has roots in the Greek word “pan,” meaning “all” or “every,” and is often described as falling under the bisexuality umbrella, along with labels like omnisexual, polysexual, bi-curious, queer, and sexually fluid. It might be used to indicate that a person has attraction to all genders or that gender identity isn’t an important variable in their attraction to other people.
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Koshka didn’t always use the label of pansexual. As a freshman in high school, she came out as a lesbian. “I was absolutely sure that I would never really, truly be attracted to or be able to fall in love with a man in the same way I fell for my first girlfriend,” she says. “Ironically, I continued to hook up with cis and trans guys throughout high school just because I liked being desired and I liked sex—yet I confidently continued to identify fully as gay!”
When she went to college, though, a friends-with-benefits situation with a cisgender man turned into something more. The relationship pushed her to consider if her sexual orientation might be a little more nuanced.
“Somehow I landed on the term ‘pansexual,’” she says. “Looking back at it now, though, I can imagine there was a great deal of freedom and limitlessness that I linked with pansexuality. It was a simple way to describe what I had been absolutely unable to articulate as a teenager. None of the boxes I could tick felt right at the time, and my discovery of pansexuality almost feels like the lack of a box entirely. I think I liked that a lot.”
How many people are pansexual?
Koshka is a part of the swelling number of young people who identify as pansexual. But it’s hard to know exactly how many people use this term to describe themselves. Many research surveys still don’t include it as an option unless they’re specifically looking into something related to pansexuality, so it’s hard to get a broader view.
Source: SELF
