The Label Wars Are Over and the Bisexuals Won
Currents
Should people who are attracted to both females and males call themselves “bisexual” or “pansexual?” This question seems like a raging debate within chronically online LGBT circles from the way some people scream about it. In reality, it’s just hot air; a manufactured controversy spun up by a tiny group of Tumblr and TikTok diehards who have been beating a drum for years that bisexuality is somehow transphobic, outdated, or oppressive. Spoiler alert: it’s not. The entire issue hinges upon a misunderstanding of what bisexuality means and why we have sexual orientation terms in the first place — one that society in general and the LGBT community in particular overwhelmingly sees through, as the results of a new poll show.
Let’s get a few things straight. “Bisexual” is a sexual orientation term correctly understood by both the sex research community and everyday people as describing those who have both same-sex and opposite-sex attractions. Queer theorists and their online disciples may rant all day about how sexual orientation was invented by doctors to pathologize us, but there’s a problem with their worldview. The truth is, sexual orientation is a concept invented by the first LGBT activists so we could fight for our human rights. Even today, our right across much of the world to same-sex intimacy and same-sex marriage is protected by referring to the concept of sexual orientation. But queer theorists insist that all that matters is personal identity.
The term pansexual was ironically first created as a pathologizing, Freudian term. The meaning has since morphed to signal some version of gender-blindness, love regardless of gender, or in its most pernicious form: “inclusive of trans people, unlike those icky bisexuals who oppress us all with the sex binary through the prefix ‘bi.’” In other words, this is some well-intentioned but very unserious and garbled nonsense. Sadly, quite a few bi activists in their eternal quest to treat sexuality like a leftist revolutionary movement, happily make room for pansexuality by re-defining bisexuality as attraction to two (and possibly more) genders. It’s silly. By this definition, a cis man who is only attracted to cis women and non-binary people “assigned female at birth” is bisexual with a fetish for vulvas. A decade ago, we would have just called him straight.
Sexual orientation terms like bisexual, homosexual (same-sex attracted), and heterosexual (opposite-sex attracted), describe the relationship between a person’s biological sex and the sex of those to whom they are attracted. Sexual orientation doesn’t refer to gender because laws that criminalize relationships between two men or two women do so on the basis of sex, just as laws that protect the relationships of LGBT people are also based on sex. Gender is a subjective, culturally-specific, and nebulous concept that didn’t even exist until John Money invented it in 1966 (and his theory of gender famously resulted in ruined lives for his most famous patients). If this all sounds like academic gobbledygook to you — congratulations! You have common sense. And the general public agrees with you.
Gallup’s latest survey puts things into crystal-clear perspective. The poll found that 7.2% of US adults identified as something other than heterosexual — over double what we saw a decade ago! — and among LGBT adults, nearly 60% were bisexual. Within this bisexual cohort, over 97% described themselves as bisexual, compared to 2.8% who identified as pansexual. In other words, bi is preferred 34-to-one over pan. While the clashes between pan activists and normies seem so heated online, in real life there’s no contest: the numbers speak for themselves. Even Congress has higher approval numbers than pansexuality. And Congress, not too long ago, polled worse than colonoscopies, Nickelback, and Genghis Khan.
None of this stops pan dead-enders from pushing misconceptions about bisexuality being exclusionary and bigoted. In activist spaces, it’s depressingly common to see bi portrayed as “pan minus trans” or “pan but clueless about Systemic Oppression.” Of course, this is the same crowd who will say things like “I’m attracted to all genders except for cis men” — in other words, “bi plus misandry.” Pan folks, we are told, don't discriminate against genitals (neither do bi people). We are told that pan is inclusive of trans people (so is bi). And no matter how many times bi folks explain that bisexuality does not exclude trans people, this radical fringe just plugs their ears. Equally frustrating is that in non-LGBT-specific spaces, well-meaning normies have no earthly clue what these pansplainers are even saying, but will accept what they hear at face value and then go on to spread misinformation about bisexual folks supposedly being transphobic.
Some people seem to need a refresher on the difference between sex and gender. Gender is a social construct. There’s no limit to how many genders there could potentially be. Sex, by contrast, is simple (and yes, sometimes complex) biology. There are only two sexes, and all humans fit into one or the other category. (And no, intersex is not a third sex. Differences in sexual development don’t result in entirely discrete sexes with new functions, let alone ones that continue from generation to generation.) So, bisexuality, far from denigrating or excluding gender or trans people, sidesteps the matter altogether by focusing on what we can most clearly measure — sex — which covers all people. If you are able to be attracted to both sexes, that includes whatever self-conception of gender the members of those two sexes might hold in their heads.
Bi was never trans-exclusive, which is why this perception of a Thunderdome-style deathmatch between bi and pan is a lot like a puppy barking at its own reflection. This illusion of a divide over labels within the bi community, and its underlying confusion, are symptoms of a larger phenomenon I lived through as a teenager: the Tumblrification of LGBT politics.
My public school education covered little in the way of sexual orientation, gender, and sex ed — a far too common experience in the US. So my sex ed and LGBT education came instead from Tumblr, where my emo friends and I spent enormous amounts of time. For us, and many other young people in alternative subcultures, Tumblr was our virtual playground — where self-exploration, sexuality, teenage humor, and adolescent angst converged in an endless scroll of simulated belonging. It was a place where kids got what they mistook for clarity, community, and acceptance, and we jumped headlong into whatever trend we were being fed without scrutiny or question.
We learned about LGBTQQPIAA2S+ and spent countless hours looking through the never-ending list of fabricated labels that blended Latin root words with “-sexual.” The Internet would hand us these terms that seemed to describe exactly how we felt and made us feel seen. We would cling to these labels like a kind of existential certificate to prove that we were real. What’s more, we quickly picked up on the sort of prestige these online spaces bestowed upon anyone attaching a sexual identity label to themselves. Nobody wanted to be perceived as normal, plain, or a member of the sheep-like majority group.
It started with labels like “sapiosexual” (attraction to intelligent people) and “demisexual” (attraction to people only after one has developed an emotional bond). Some others included “akoisexual” (sexual attraction to people but without the desire for those feelings to be reciprocated), “pomosexual” (a label for people who don’t like sexual labels), and “allosexual” (having any sexual attractions at all!). Like so many made-up Tumblr identities, these aren’t actual sexual orientations, but rather sexual preferences or attachment styles (and fairly common ones, at that) dressed up in the language of sexuality to make people look and feel unique and interesting. Amid this blizzard of labels, however, one was verboten. Breathe a word about bisexuality, and all hell broke loose.
The sin of bringing up bisexuality was met with swift and venomous retribution from the champions of Tolerance and Acceptance. If someone said they were bi, they could expect to be quickly dogpiled by Tumblrinas telling them how “problematic” and transphobic they were being. They were told they were “obsessed with genitals” and provided a list of superior identity labels to choose from that were “less oppressive” or “more correct.” Some came and went, such as “multisexual”, “omnisexual”, and “polysexual.” But “pansexual” emerged from the bunch and stuck around as the kid-tested Tumblr-approved replacement for bisexual, along with the confused mantra of “hearts, not parts.”
When you take a bunch of young people with queer inclinations, left-wing values, and little to no sex education, and present them with a particular label, idea, or identity as being “affirming” and “inclusive”, getting them to jump on the bandwagon is child’s play. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that pansexual took off on Tumblr and among the too-online activist left. It never made the jump across the online-IRL barrier for the same reason “Latinx” faltered: it makes no sense, we already have perfectly good words, and everyday people find it weird. Out here in the land of grass, hardly anyone identifies as pansexual (0.1% of US adults). But in the realm of 1’s and 0’s, the Tumblrinas have fabricated the illusion of controversy. It only takes a relatively small number of people to make a mess of things, however, especially if they’re loud and coordinated.
Needlessly overcomplicating the concept of sexual orientation with far-left identity politics does not help the LGBT community. Not only does it inaccurately ascribe a uniformity of political views to LGBT people where a diversity of opinion exists, but it alienates the wider society by creating partisan associations that encourage everyone outside of the hard left to see us as adversaries. Nothing broadcasts “leftist infighting” like communities with so many screeching pedantic ideologues trying to one-up each other with ever-purer labels. What we end up with is alphabet soup and a meaningless litany of eye-roll-inducing fauxdentities.
As this recent Gallup poll shows us, however, the kids are alright. The online fringe remains online only. The LGBT community continues to grow, and bi folks are leading the way. Let’s leave Tumblr where it belongs, in 2014, and ignore this nontroversy over labels. Life is too short to waste time worrying about a small number of extremists too dogmatic to ever change their minds. Bi folks are taking over the world without them.
Published Mar 30, 2023
Updated Apr 3, 2023
