There's a risk of me potentially offending someone but I am an outsider trying to get to grips with this terminology. Online, I read someone who identified themself as a
pansexual trans/gender-fluid person
I'd like to know if my understanding of the following terms is generally correct.
I just about get the difference between a transsexual and a transgender. The former is someone who has undergone a sex change that matches their personality and psychological identity, whereas a transgender does not necessarily have their sexual organs altered by surgery to match the sex they feel is theirs from birth.
I believe that a gender fluid person is someone who can fluctuate between feeling male or female, or they perceive to have the characteristics of both sexes within themselves and as such, they do not assign themselves a specific sex.
However, I'm not entirely sure what a pansexual is. Online research suggests it is someone who is sexually attracted and has sexual intercourse with either sex, i.e. male and female persons. But isn't that the same as a bisexual?
(pansexual in Wikipedia)
Pansexuality, or omnisexuality, is the sexual, romantic or emotional attraction towards people regardless of their sex or gender identity. Pansexual people may refer to themselves as gender-blind, asserting that gender and sex are not determining factors in their romantic or sexual attraction to others.
And Oxford Dictionaries define pansexual as
adjective
Not limited in sexual choice with regard to biological sex, gender, or gender identity.
The term pansexual has its origin in 1917 and is a compound of pan- meaning "all" and -sexual, of or related to sex.
Yet, the definition of the older term bisexual, first recorded in 1815–25 but whose meaning of "attracted to both sexes" is from 1914, is very similar to that of pansexual.
From Dictionary.com and Oxford Dictionaries:
bisexual
noun 4. a person who is romantically or sexually attracted to both men and women, or to people of various gender identities; ambisexual.
• adjective Sexually attracted not exclusively to people of one particular gender; attracted to both men and women.
• noun A person who is sexually attracted not exclusively to people of one particular gender.
Q 1. What is the difference between a bisexual and a pansexual?
Q 2. I understand that the term gender-fluid was created for those who do not want to be defined as a man or woman, but gender-fluid has many derivatives: agender, nongendered, genderless, and genderfree. Why is there no agreement in the LGTBQ community for a single, simple term to express this gender and sexual preference?
Best Answer
The other answers are well-taken. To attempt a tl;dr:
The people? Probably nothing. But the difference between the terms 'bisexual' and 'pansexual' is that the former implicitly assumes two genders ('binary gender') or attraction to only two genders while the latter implies that there are more (possibly many more) than 'male' and 'female'. People who identify as pansexual may not have issues with bisexuals per se but probably consider their own terminology more inclusive of the genderqueer.
1st, because people disagree about language choices all the time for no good reason at all. All the moreso when so many neologisms are dealing so closely with identity, sexuality, and politics. 2nd, because 'the LGTBQ community' is an expression, not an actual gang that has regular conferences with a steering committee to hash out things in the interim. 3rd, because those terms, especially as self-applied, are not precisely overlapping and do not imply a new set third gender but an openness to either conceiving of more than two or personally ignoring them, whatever and however many they are.