So I saw someone discussing this on my dash, but it looked like possibly a private conversation or just an offshoot of another conversation, and I didn’t feel right butting in.
But I feel fine with making my own post about the subject, and that subject is:
The Origin of Pan(sexual)
At least, the origin in so far as I lived it. Obviously the term spread for a variety of reasons in a variety of places. This post is a personal testimony of one experience with this political movement, but I think it’s one people need to hear.
Imagine, if you will, The End of the Nineties. I know many of you weren’t there for that (hell, I barely was, I was like apparently eleven at the time of most of this stuff, but I was also being dubiously raised by a rotating assortment of Very Queer People so there’s that at least).
So any, imagine the era roughly from 1999-2003.
We’ll give you riots until you give us rights was still a rallying call of our people, but the desperate fervour of the AIDS epidemic was beginning to dial down to a more manageable level. New treatments existed, the government wasn’t as out for our blood as before, and the fact of the matter was so many of us were dead and scarred by all that death, burnt out from all that anger. To a certain degree, there was a deep exhaustion in our communities.
Decades of attempted genocide will do that to you.
As well, the systems we had relied on for introducing new queer youth to queer culture has begun to fall apart because there’s just not enough queer elders who are both alive and able to take that task on. Not everywhere, not like there had once been.
Pamphlets and manifestos had always been critical outreach, but now they became some of the only things available, especially in rural and suburban areas where there weren’t large enough populations of queer people to self sustain, or where organizing in a large way was effectively a death sentence in itself.
Queer groups had always been localized and closed, but now populations were patchy enough that state and national networking through mailing lists were rising to prominence out of necessity.
And with this, there was increased exposure to each other’s different definitions of queer.
One of the terms that, it turned out, was the least uniformly established was bisexual. There were basically two ways “bi” was used in those days. In some circles, it meant “neither gay nor straight.” If it was analyzed at all, it was generally decided to be a catchall term for anyone else who showed up, a very broad umbrella. For the most part, it just meant “whoever I like.”
And in many other places “bi” meant two.
It meant men and women. It meant “real” men and women, that is to say, cis ones.
But the 90s had also given prominence to this previously undefined group of gender nonconforming people who had previously just sort of shrugged when asked their gender. There was a new word on the block, and that word was genderqueer.
The 90s had also given prominence to transsexual/transgender people and began to impress upon the populace that trans women weren’t Super Ultra Gays, but were in fact their own group of people with unique experiences. (Trans men, I am sure you have heard by now, were basically invisible at this point in time: either they were classed as hard butch, or they were stealth and had no association with queerness).
It’s worth noting that the 90s also gave prominence to the inclusion of intersex people, but that’s a subject I’m less well versed in (unfortunately). I never met another intersex person- to my knowledge- during that formative period of my life, and if I did I wouldn’t have known or understood what it meant anyway.
So, as the nineties drew to a close and all these previously indeterminate groups started becoming more well known and more recognized and more seen at all, there was inevitable conflict.
There were bi people who had never even heard of transness and who were revolted by it in the way cis people always are. There were bi people who had never heard of genderqueerness and insisted that genderqueers were really men/women based on their sex organs.
There were also bi people who learned, to their alarm, that according to these complete strangers halfway across the country their own identity literally excluded themselves. Or their partners. Or just people they had never even met but still recognized the inherent humanity of.
And worse, that definition of Real Men and Real Women was getting more and more well known as networking continued to expand.
It was easy for cis gay and lesbian people to understand and include in queer literature that was even then dominated by gay voices, but more importantly, it was easy for Straight people to understand and pass around in their own dangerous and damning ways.
Especially in places where queer community was patchy and inconsistent, often with gaps where people were dead or had fled, the national scale information was the best thing many of us had.
That meant “bi means 2″ became the dominant interpretation pretty quickly.
So, there were basically two responses to that.
The first was to reclaim and redefine bisexual.
That movement is the one, I think, that has been the most consistent.
It has also had varying levels of success, given that every year or so we have another rousing round of “well actually, bi means 2 or more.” But by 2016, most people seem to either naturally understand that bi includes trans people, or are open to learning that fact quite quickly.
The second response to the corruption of bi was to break ties with a word that was rapidly being used as a way to seriously hurt people, and make something new. Something that would be self defined rather than reclaimed from medical studies, and that would be clearer and more transparent even in its basic design.
That was basically how pansexual rose to prominence. (Some people say pansexual as a term existed even into the 80s, but I have seen no evidence or firsthand accounts of it before the 90s. Certainly if it did exist in the 80s, then this political context is why it became a Big Deal rather than staying a niche concept).
And, that’s part of why, today, pansexual remains its own unique identity.
Even though at this point bisexual has mostly been cleansed of the horrible debacle that was binarism-and-transphobia-in-the-90s, pansexuality literally is a separate political group from bisexuality. The identity fractured off and became its own unique culture and label.
The old claim that “bi is transphobic” is nonsense today, but that claim came from a very real historical problem.
The pansexual identity spread as a way to try to combat that problem- and there are people on this very website who will attest to the fact that in the 90s and 00s knowing someone was pan rather than bi was fairly similar to seeing someone wearing a “trans ally” pin today: it marked the potential for a safer relationship.
Whether pansexuality is still “necessary” today, when bisexual is more often accepted as meaning 2+, is irrelevant.
The fact is, pansexuality is here and it’s not going to go anywhere any time soon.
