I'm bisexual.
I'm lucky. I've never had any serious internalized struggles with my being bisexual. Of course, I've had to remain selectively closeted throughout my life: I've felt the pressure of a clearly unwelcoming and outright dangerous surrounding community. It's not something I mention if I feel unsafe. But I grew up mostly safe. I've had girlfriends and boyfriends and partners. I'm lucky. I didn't internalize hatred in any significant amount. But I did struggle with something else.
My feelings about pansexuality.
This wasn't from external pressure. It was a mix of things, but mostly I felt threatened. Here is a group of people, I thought, whose existence threatens mine. Did they feel too good for bisexuality? Were they trying to show off how ~progressive~ they were; how ~accepting~? Why were they splitting hairs? Why did they have to do that? It was similar for polysexuality and omnisexuality too, but they weren't as rooted in my mind as pansexuality. Pansexuality was what my mind latched onto.
I felt threatened. I felt that pansexuality's existing made bisexuality a target: that I wasn't inclusive enough, that I was old hat, that I was part of the problem. I felt that pansexuality's existing was supposed to be a move "forward," a sign that bisexuality was becoming a defunct, outdated term that people didn't want to associate with nowadays.
But it's who I am.
And I was scared.
It's only now, as I'm writing it out, that I understand what it was. I didn't, back then. I wanted to be be open and accepting. I wanted to be happy for pansexuals, and I wanted to be excited that pansexuality existed, that there was another community, another label, another way for people to understand themselves. But I wasn't. And I didn't know why. And instead, I found anger.
Do you want to know how I dealt with that?
I worked through it.
No, really. I didn’t harrass anyone, I didn’t repurpose community flags, nothing. I just spent time trying to understand why people used pansexuality as a term. I found out that pansexuality has been a label for decades. I learned that it was used in certain areas to indicate support of and attraction to trans people, because - yes - some people did use "bisexual" to mean cis men and women only. Some people still do.
I learned why people use it, ranging from things like "I like the flag better" to "I need the specificity" to "I want to emphasize the nature of my attraction as including all gender variations" to "It just feels right."
And, yeah, bi doesn't only mean two, but that doesn't mean it has the same specific connotations of pansexuality that some people just...need. And that's okay. Bisexuality is a broad term, but broad terms don't feel like home for everyone who might be able to live there.
Pansexuality does not take away from bisexuality. It gives a new opportunity for people who need it. Pansexuality is not an attempt to outdate bisexuality. It's just another expression of attraction that happens to overlap.
I'm still dealing with the last bits of my strange defensiveness against pansexuality, and of my negative feelings about other m-spec identities there are only shadows left. I'm still confronting and working through the automatic feelings that still sometimes pop up. But I can do that and still support my pan, ply, omni, and overall m-spec siblings, because at the end of the day, my feelings about someone else's identity are not only irrelevant, but also are not any sort of moral basis for mistreatment.
I owed it to myself and to pansexuals to confront these feelings, and I owed it to myself and to pansexuals to be an ally and a friend even as I was doing so.
I did not make my personal feelings their problem. A continuous assault on someone else's identity is a conscious decision. Make the conscious decision, instead, to be kind.
Personal feelings are not an indicator of morality, nor should they be the basis for action. Act with radical kindness.
[ID: Image is of the multisexual pride flag, displaying five horizontal stripes. The top and bottoms stripes are thick, while the middle three stripes are narrow, so that all three of the middle stripes put together are as thick as the outer stripes. The top and bottom stripes are pink and blue, respectively, and the three stripes in the middle are the colors of the bisexual, pansexual and polysexual flags' middle stripes, in that order: purple, yellow, and green. /end ID]