this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
567 points (94.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43782 readers
892 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Out of interest, why? Shouldn't it be the other way around, that bi is a subset of pan?
Read the bisexual manifesto. Bi has always included nonbinary people. If you are attracted to all genders, both bisexual and pansexual are valid labels you can choose.
Actually didn't know that, even though I identify as bi lol. Pretty sure my other bi and pan friends didn't know either from the kinds of discussions we've had. But then that's just a bad choice linguistically, no? It's very misleading because you literally have the terms bi and non-bi and you need to read some manifesto to understand that they're not a contradiction. Meanwhile aside from the stupid overdone cookware joke, I think nobody ever questioned the meanings of terms like pan or omni, because they make sense linguistically.
Homosexual is attraction to the same gender; heterosexual is attraction to a different gender. The bi in bisexual is both of these, not attraction to two genders. Think of the bi flag, pink, purple, and blue: what do you think the colors represent? Nonbinary people have always been included in bisexual if you take some time to think about.
I don't doubt your textbook correctness or the historical correctness of this, and maybe I should stress that I am not trying to exclude anyone from the bi term, but at least in my anecdotal experience, these terms are mostly used "wrongly", meaning that there is a lot of confusion. And the meanings of words change as people start using them with different intended meanings.
Therefore, given the premise that we want to simplify things by cleaning up some redundant terms, I would prefer to keep the one whose meaning is intuitively clear to everyone. I just don't see why - given bi, pan and omni all mean the same thing - one should choose the most misunderstood/misused term.
Personally, I would just keep the terms and let people choose whichever they like, I'm just trying to entertain this discussion of choosing to keep only one of them and the pros/cons for each choice.