The Bi vs Pan Debate

if you're a teenager on Tumblr in 2012 bisexuality is the epitome of transphobia by means to therefore it's exclusionary you're obviously only attracted to cismen and CIS women and that's transphobic it's EnV phobic you're a bad person not being attracted to trans people and non-binary people is bad and evil oh unless you're gay or a lesbian then it's fine that's different but you bisexuals you're evil for not liking trans people and non-binary people which I assume that you don't because by means too that's my evidence I don't need any more evidence than that I understand how words work go yourself evil shame not like us good pansexuals I'll a transperson therefore I'm better than you maybe my sample size is skewed by being a bisexual idiot but all the trans and non-binary people I know are bisexual or you know they just use Queer as they catch all to avoid the debate at all because it's kind of hard to explain to people that you're a non-binary bisexual so this definition of bisexual as being exclusionary never made any sense to me bisexuality and pansexuality have approximately the same definition people online will disagree with me on this they'll say they're two separate identities they're very different bisexuals are attracted to people of two or more genders and pansexuals are attracted to people regardless of gender those semantic details don't really hold up to me at all let me tell you what I think the difference is the word garbage was first written in the 1500s it meant approximately the same thing it means today garbage cabbage trash something that you throw out the word garbage is still used today but now we have a new word it's my name trash trash garbage please to make your acquaintance these words are completely interchangeable they mean the same thing the stuff you throw away stuff no one wants it's dirty it's stinky and no one wants it trash but trash and garbage actually have slightly different definitions according to the website what's the difference garbage refers to things like kitchen scraps um the trash from the bathroom old food moldy bread used tampons gross stuff from your house trash refers to things like broken furniture and old tires stuff that you would throw away because it's broken not necessarily normal household Refuge so they're actually two entirely different concepts with entirely different meanings only no one uses them that way when people call a raccoon a trash Panda they're imagining it eating old pizza slices not sitting around on old tires and broken furniture and that's how I feel about the definition of bisexual versus pansexual who is using the term bisexual to mean that they're strictly attracted to men and women and that non-binary people can go ourselves or each other in my experience who's using it that way nobody nobody's using it that way every bisexual person is using a definition that's something like oh I never have sex with anyone because I'm a nervous mess around people of all genders that I'm attracted to and I have no Riz and therefore I'm just alone and sad and bisexual and I can't sit in chairs correctly or they're using it to mean I'm in a 15 person polycule and raising two kids with my my by gender they friend and their three partners and their partners partners and I never have any time to sit alone and watch The X Files with my cat because I'm taking the kids to ballet and the ballet company's always asking me to build sets for them because they think that I'm good at carpentry because I wear Doc Martin but I'm not and I don't know how to tell them that so I do it anyway and I never have time to go on dates with all of these people I'm dating and I'm seeing this new girl and I'm going to take my they friend to their art gallery opening soon because it's really cool they do like horror embroidery and I'm really interested in that and them in general and I'm super excited about this new relationship but you know I want to balance out my other 15 Partners it's pretty I mean that's anyway that's what my sexuality is basically it does mean attraction regardless of gender uh experiences vary people use it in different ways it's a very versatile term despite what people kind of pigeon hole it as and like dating people of different genders will change the way that you date someone even if you're like I'm pansexual and I don't see gender it will change when you're dating someone who's one gender versus another gender there's different considerations you have to take into account um this real is a good example the English language is for everyone why can't I some slurs hey I just wanted to let you know my ex and I do still live together but I'm totally over her I only cry about her like four times a day so hook up with girls right can you film it for me sometime sounds like what I watch on the Hub yeah yeah that's H has anyone ever told you that you remind them of strawberry coffee cream on a beautiful winter day and a surprise lilac bloom and fall hey uh if we're not going to can you just spend M me for your part of dinner getting the super crazy electric guitar probably never heard of it super super rare it's called a Defender Strat you probably play that Taylor Swift acoustic has anyone ever told you that your eyes are like uncharted waters that I could get lost in and hopefully live at least 5 years until it was discovered therapy is such a scam bro like even bisexuals don't agree on a standardized definition of the word people get really hung up on the idea that it means two two or more they get really hung up on just the prefix by I think we can abandon the original roots of the word and just use it the way that it's used colloquially it means you're not strictly straight gay it means your dating pool is not limited to just men or just women that's pretty much all it means and that's what pansexual means too it's like how betwix and between are the same place bisexual is just an archaic word to mean the same concept as pansexual it's just an older word for it like garbage versus Trash I personally am both garbage and trash and I use by SL pan online and conversationally no one defines themselves using these strict dictionary definitions and queer labels are clumsy a lot of people who have very kind of different experiences and identities get lumped together into these same identity terminology a lot of the time transsexuals fairies Queens transvestites these were all kind of distinct identities distinct distinct ideas at one point in time and eventually a lot of these people got lumped into being either trans women or not trans women they got lumped together into kind of those two categories despite being kind of very different people disperate identities now they're lumped into these categories together trans women and queers some people became trans women when that became the popular terminology and some people firmly rejected this categorization and insisted that they were not trans women they were something else entirely fairies queers transvestites th boys whatever these terms all apply to people with different experiences different presentations different ideas about their own gender and their own presentations but they're all lumped in together because there's one word that despite their differences kind of describes all of their experiences and bisexual is the same way it's just a word that was kind of slapped onto a category of people to describe their experiences despite them being kind of all different a ton of identities were boiled down into just transgender there were like trans women trans fims andrenes non-binary people agender people trans masks trans men those are all like kind of very different gender experiences but they're all lumped together with one word transgender we can accept that the word transgender means a lot of different things to a lot of different people but we seem to have trouble accepting that the word bisexual can mean a lot of very different experiences to a lot of very different people even lesbian is used in a way that describes a lot of different people's experiences but they're all grouped together based on a few shared characteristics identities get boiled down into a single word that represents some similarities between different people bisexual is like that bisexual as it refers to human sexuality was coined in 1892 before that the term existed but it was mainly used to mean sort of unisex something with both male and female characteristics it was most often used to describe flowers or even animals like slugs and worms it was used the way that we today would use the term unisex or the term hermaphroditic there were definitely people in the 1800s and well beyond that who we today would describe as non-binary because humans who exist outside of the binary gender categorization have always existed and always will but we didn't have the terminology for that back then people largely thought of everything as two Sexes and outliers who existed in between Sexes this would be in sex people or even people who were trans or non-binary or even like gay people would cons be considered to have sort of like male and female characteristics and this was a very prevailing theory of queerness at the time was that these people who displayed this gender non-conformity this queerness of some kind had sort of internal parts of the opposite sex they had lady brains or they had the soul of a man and a female body or some other kind of spiritual or medicalization theory of some internal part of them is medically physically or metaphysically a man or a woman whatever is disparate from their assigned biological sex so lacking the terminology for this people were just considered male female or having characteristics of both meaning that they would be sort of bisexual as in intersex bisexuals have been in the queer Community since it existed uh we've always been here we always will be here bisexuality is a fact of life um there's also all of these kind of micro identities if you want to use them there's like bisexual pansexual polysexual omnisexual the other ones and they have like their own definitions that kind of fall under the same sort of people who are not attracted to strictly men or women people who aren't either fully homosexual or fully heterosexual if you want to talk like a 1950s conversion therapist or a member of the LGB Alliance in 2024 than in the 1960s bisexuals began advocating for themselves it was mostly educational initiatives saying hey we're here this is what bisexuality is We Exist they had all of these initiatives to kind of explain what bisexuality was tell people that they existed and they also had like um sex education initiatives through these bisex bisexual activism networks um it was really fascinating they existed throughout the 6070s up until the modern day Al bisexuals organized and worked in basically every form of queer activism in the 60s 70s and 80s they existed in all fronts of queer activism at the time but their experiences have sort of been erased under um gay and lesbian which is how I see it referred to in a lot of like Turf Literature Like The LGB Alliance literature they say that they're like lesbian bisexual gay but all of their stuff that they say all of their like histories are written as gay and lesbian activism gay and lesbian history they don't really talk about the be weirdly one of the groups that was on the Forefront of bisexual acceptance was the Quakers um they released a statement in 1972 that basically said bisexuals exist and we support them I mean the Quakers I don't know why the Quakers released that statement um I couldn't find like a reason that they said that uh but they seem pretty fascinating I mean their cool hats their oatmeal and their acceptance of bisexuality they're practically Keebler elves yeah the keer elves are bisexual don't look that up okay um I don't want to talk about AIDS I don't want to talk about AIDS um I grew up in the 90s and the Spectre of AIDS was just hanging over my queer little head uh for that entire time uh but I have to talk about AIDS I have to talk about AIDS so I'm gonna talk about AIDS um yeah bisexuality really kind of became known know to the public known to the siset larger society during the AIDS crisis this was the first time that by sexuality was acknowledged by the larger society but it wasn't in a good way wasn't in an acceptance and celebration kind of way nope um bisexuality was this disease Vector it was accepted as a vector for the AIDS virus to infect the larger sis head Society um a way that it could get into the household of the nuclear family and infect unsuspecting CIS white women through their secretly bisexual husbands very bitch's video on bisexual men is a really good resource for this about the Spectre of the bisexual man during the AIDS crisis and the way that this shaped public perception of bisexuality specifically male bisexuality but just bisexuality in general really in lesbian communities bisexuality was acknowledged but it was treated with a lot of Suspicion um she'll leave you for a man was like a common refrain about bisexual women um they're not real feminists was another one um but for gay men being bisexual was basically the worst thing you could be then in 1995 Newsweek invented bisexuality with this magazine cover unfortunately bisexuality had already been invented two years earlier by the unbelievable horny pilot episode of the xfiles which definitely was my bisexual Awakening and to this day I love Hot redheaded women and bisexual men who refuse to give me anything with their acting performance yes make me work for it David dukov make me guess what emotion you're trying to convey leave me hanging don't give me anything anyway um the term pansexual was invented in the 1970s but it didn't come into the mainstream until the late 2000s early 2010s and when it did come into the mainstream it was on tumblr.com oh God that website the queer discourse on that website um sometimes I think we should just Burn It To The Ground uh but you know I was on Tumblr in the ODS through the early 2010s yeah that's right I'm a queer Elder no I'm not don't tell anyone over 50 that I said that I'm I'm not a career Elder it feels that way sometimes on tumblr.com because everyone who interacts with me is like under 25 a lot of them are teenagers and that's exactly who started the bipan debate teenagers on tumblr.com in my opinion a lot of this totally wild queer discourse that happens on that website is because there's a lot of teenagers on that website and a lot of teenage queer people don't have access to the IRL queer Community even in places where there is an IRL queer Community like larger cities a lot of this is focused on bars and yeah like gay bar culture so these queer kids don't really have access to the IRL queer community so their Community is behind a screen or even behind a pay wall in a lot of cases um so their interaction with the community is purely online and often purely theoretical when I was a kid this was kind of becoming the case um a lot of gay bars were closing there were not in-person spaces for career kids I mean like if your school had a GSA you were lucky but a lot of times you couldn't join the GSA because your parents would know what clubs you were in like what club you were staying after school for because they had to pick you up from it um so you couldn't really join if your parents were super homophobic um so so we didn't really have any IRL spaces either but back then kids still hung out in person more nowadays this is not a thing kids are not just hanging out with their friends in person they're all online because the outside is a nightmare hellscape that is completely unwelcoming to kids and teenagers but back then we did have sort of queer friend groups we just find each other and we would hang out and most of my friends growing up were queer um you know gender fluid bisexual F boys they're queer fboys are queer I guess um you know just very queer friend group luckily so my interaction with queer people was not purely theoretical behind a screen growing up but now the kids don't really have access to these communities like there are gsas in schools but again it's the same problem that we had when we were young the Crux of the 2010s online by pan debate is probably why you clicked on this video to relive the cringe and infighting of the 2010's online queer culture and crucify me in the comments for my incorrect takes on this debate um good Let the hate fuel you so here's how it went down people started posting that's never good it's never good so they started posting about how um bisexuals were exclusionary bisexuals um were exclusionary of non-binary people but also of trans people a lot of the time a lot of these posts said that bisexuality was excluding trans people and non-binary people because it was only dating men and women not transmen and trans women and non-binary people um it kind of saw trans people as a third gender in and of themselves um and they decided to solve this bisexual problem with this brand new sexuality they learned about pansexuality basically the Crux of it was bisexuality is exclusive and problematic it's transphobic it's bad your identity is bad it's problematic and you should stop being that you should start identifying as this brand new thing which is good and holy otherwise you're bad and evil the odac coming into our community and telling us that we have to start calling ourselves something else or we're bad and we're Evil saying you aren't you anymore you're this other thing bisexuals were reactionary at the time um we've been through a lot of bisexuals kind of get on from all sides um straight people don't like us gay people don't really like us and now other bisexuals in our opinion were saying we were bad and saying we had to start identifying as this brand new thing or we were wrong this just felt like another biphobic attack um just like all the other ones um saying we should stop identifying as bisexual which you know we'd heard that before we heard that before from everyone all the time you know our mothers said just be straight and the gays said just be gay we'd heard it before and this wasn't necessarily this big biphobic attack ATT the people saying these things were and I cannot stress this enough literal children but it felt that way it felt like a biphobic attack we'd been told our identity was problematic forever since the beginning you know so this just felt like the same adopting the term pansexual felt like a way to distance ourselves from our bisexual identities to avoid biphobia to avoid the Discrimination bisexual face by simply making up a new word for it and not fighting back against bobia but giving in and saying it's okay we're not bisexuals we're the good ones that's how it felt to me and a lot of online bisexuals in the 2010s when this was going on we'd been told that in order to be good and not problematic we had to stop identifying as bisexual by the sis community and by the gay community for a long time before this and now we were being told the exact same thing over and over again stop identifying as bisexual and we'll like you if you keep identifying as bisexual we'll hate you we know that sweetie you already do that you already did that we know and I get that pansexual is more accurate it's like a more accurate word you know because pan means all and by means do so it's like you know a little update to the terminology but that's not how it was presented at the time um if it had been presented that way as like here's this new word um we should start using this instead because it's more accurate to our experience I think there would have been a lot higher rate of adoption of the term pansexual but it was presented as sort of this you're bad if you're bisexual and bisexuals as I said were reactionary at the time we had been told this our entire lives stop being bisexual stop being bisexual it's bad to be bisexual and that's how pansexual was presented is presented as like by being bisexual is bad you should be this new thing um so we weren't super keen on that we don't like being attacked people in general don't like being attacked for their identity especially so adoption rates of the term pansexual were low as a result of mainly that so to me the bisexual pansexual discourse is largely semantic it's largely about the adoption of a new word rather than a separate identity I personally consider both words to be describing the same phenomenon attraction to people outside of just men women you're not only attracted to men you're not only attracted to women you're attracted to people and that will vary you know it's not like bisexuality is 50/50 um and even people who identify as one of the little micro labels like poly or Omni it's like the same experience we're all kind of having similar experiences here and we lump everyone into one thing call all those people transgender who have very different experiences so I don't really see um why by SL pan or whatever can't Encompass a bunch of different experiences but a lot of people online act like it can't they're like oh these are very different identities and they can't all be lumped together into one um as if we don't do that all the time so I think it's just an update of the word and I think the reasons so many people still identify as bisexual versus pansexual and there was a low adoption rate of the term pansexual um it's a much smaller group of people who identify strictly as Pan versus bisexual um I think the reason for this is that for one a lot of people had just been identifying as bisexual their whole lives and a lot of you will know it's hard to change that it's hard to say oh I no longer identify as this thing I identify as this other thing now it's like a whole second coming out process and a lot of people didn't want to do that they didn't want to deal with that um and also you know the way it was presented felt like an attack and people weren't into that they didn't want to change their identity after it was attacked like that um and I think semantics plus let's be real here I'm going to be real with you guys okay pansexual sounds like I'm attracted to Kitchen implements sounds like I want to Mrs pots actually I mean maybe we could do spout stuff no no um no that's not important um I think the main reason that it wasn't adopted was this Tumblr Campaign which made it seem like bisexuality was bad and evil and that kind of thing doesn't make you want to change your identity being attacked doesn't really make you want to change um I think we know that based on online discourse people tend to double down when they're attacked or when they perceive that they're being attacked um even if they're incorrect if they feel attacked they tend to double down on that wrong opinion not to say bisexuality is wrong it's just an identity being told your identity is invalid doesn't make you want to adopt a new identity it doesn't make you want to be friendly makes you want to have a fist fight in a parking lot or is that just me no no that's Universal Human Experience I know so the way it was presented as um you're transphobic if you don't adopt this term versus here's a fun new word that could describe your experience kind of resulted in it not being adopted and of course some of the discourse was just outright wrong a lot of these young kind of inexperienced um not very knowledgeable propan seexual people said that it was trans trans phobic because it didn't include trans people it was just cismen and CIS women this sort of otherized um trans people it otherwised them by saying trans men aren't just men and trans women aren't just women which they are um transen aren't just some separate category they're men and trans women aren't some special thing they're women so even if by means to they're not excluded but there was some discourse that was like this is excluding it's excluding all of the transes um not the case for sure if anything that was transphobic the um idea that pansexuality is not excluding trans people and bisexuality is because you're saying trans men and women aren't just men and women so people didn't like that and as for the claims of NV phobia um non-binary discrimination or whatever um yeah I can see how people got there because the suffix or the prefix by means to so men and women obviously but it's never really been used this way in practice um the word you know it has always really meant attraction outside of the binary of just men and women we just can't be semantic about this we have to use the word as it's used in practice and it's always kind of meant not heterosexual not homosexual not gay or straight but a secret third thing and I'm not pulling this idea that they're basically the same thing out of nowhere there was a 2017 study that was done which showed that bisexual and pansexual people had no difference in the way they described their attraction to multiple genders to people of various genders there was no difference in the way bisexuals describe the way that they're attracted to people versus the way pansexuals described their attraction to people no difference at all the words appeared to be two different words for the exact same phenomenon so the idea that bisexuality is exclusionary is false but what if it wasn't what if it wasn't false what if bisexual people were only attracted to men and women would that be a problem a common refrain in the anti-trans uh gay and lesbian movement um especially among like lesbian separatist Turf types is that homosexuality lesbian that means attraction to men and or women so you're only attracted to women and you know the turfs extrapolate like only CIS women um okay so homosexuality means you're only attracted to your own sex or gender that's inherently exclusive that's inherently exclusionary you're excluding everyone who's not your gender or sex or whichever you feel is right the right word um why is that not a problem why is it a problem if a bisexual person is only attracted to women but a gay person is not attracted to a non-binary person and that's not a problem they're gay why is that a problem I know that gay and lesbian people are required to explain why they're not attracted to the opposite um sex or gender that's why the uh Born This Way narrative behim a thing they had to sort of explain their sexuality explain like why aren't you attracted to men or women um so they were required to explain that but for bisexual people I feel like it's much more so they're much more so required to explain their sexuality and answer for it especially among the queer community in the queer Community if you're gay you're not expected to explain that you're not expected to be like oh like you know I don't exclude non-binary people I'm just not attracted to them because I'm gay but a bisexual person would have to explain that if they were only attracted to men and women which is not the case um I've never met anyone who feels that way so why are only bisexuals under these accusations of EnV phobia and transphobia for their sexuality not for doing anything but just for their sexuality well bisexuality is deviant it's not just deviant from the sis head Society it's deviant from popular Notions of queerness as well popular understanding understandings of homosexuality if people are fluid and can just choose to date anyone of any gender this is a problem for The Narrative of we're born this way we don't have a choice if people are choosing to date anyone regardless of gender this puts a lot of holes in the people are born gay or straight narrative and bisexuals are inside those holes this gives Credence to the Christian ideology that um people can just choose to be straight because bisexuals can just choose to enter into a heterosexual relationship and stay there and and a lot of repressed Christians think this a lot of very oppressed bisexual Christians truly believe that homosexuality is a choice because they did it they chose to just marry a man or a woman and raise a traditional nuclear family together and overcome their homosexual urges and they did well they married someone they didn't overcome their homosexual urges trust me you're bisexual for life but they think since they're actively choosing to be heterosexual all the time and they are just actively choosing that that anyone can do that that homosexuality isn't real and this is kind of the the basis of their principles on conversion therapy it's a result of bisexual eraser they don't realize that bisexuality exists they think that people are just choosing to be gay that anyone could make that choice because they chose not to so they're erasing bisexuality while also describing bisexuality everyone has those feelings you just have to choose not to act on them not everyone is bisexual sweetie a lot of people don't have those feelings you're bisexual sorry to break it to you repressed Christians if you're choosing actively to not be gay you're bisexual sorry but that gives these anti-gay activists this easy Narrative of just choose not to and that's a problem for the gay community um the fact that they have this Credence this these ex gays who are bisexuals who just kind of married got married and stopped having sex with their friends [Music] um that lends Credence to their conversion therapy works narrative and that's a problem you know for the gay community when people have this apparent success in deing themselves this means bisexuality can be viewed as a threat to both the normative sis head standards and to the gay community as well bisexuality is seen as evil greedy the sexuality of cheaters and Liars a vector of disease bringing AIDS into good God-fearing households and bringing AIDS into good Bush loving lesbian households too AIDS really mess things up for the bisexual community so pansexual is seen as woke open-minded and wholesome in comparison to those dirty bisexuals those filthy filthy dirty bisexuals hit me up if you're a filthy dirty bisexual by the way get in the comments anyway um why do I still call myself bisexual trash you're non-binary what the hell are you doing what the hell are you doing why are you identifying as bisexual that doesn't make any sense you're racing yourself I know yeah uh well I usually say by SL Pan um I don't use pan sexual um and I guess here's my reasoning I'm not attracted to Mrs pots I just see her as a friend sorry I know one day the right Scrub Daddy will come along and he'll get into all of your grooves and curves but you're not not the one for me sweetie so the reason is because I was a reactionary bisexual in the 2010s and I read this online discourse which I saw as being written by a bunch of nerds and I said you I'm bisexual I'm not changing my entire identity for you for you nerds on tumblr.com um I'm too busy anyway to change my identity I'm busy developing crippling alcoholism Chron anxiety and sleeping with all of my friends and my friends exes I'm busy I'm not changing my identity for you nerds you think I have time to develop a whole new identity go yourself so that was the main reason I was just a teenager in the 2010s uh teenager into my 20s and I didn't want didn't want to do it and I thought pansexuals were being weird about this you guys were making it weird uh on tumblr.com and I was like I'm good I'm good and I think the pan flag is ugly ugly sorry the main thing is words don't really keep up with our understanding of the world we have genders nowadays that would gasify a Victorian child language just can't keep up with our everchanging understanding of gender and sexuality it hasn't and it won't um and sometimes words just mean more than their root parts that is what it is so to me the bipan debate was less about it being two different sexualities the development of a new sexuality as it was of just words not keeping up with our modern understanding of the world and of human sexuality and that's kind of what I think the Crux of the issue was is that uh we developed this new word that more accurately describe the phenomenon that we already had a word for and um we didn't have good communication about it um science communication uh liberal arts communication it's actually really hard to do it's hard to introduce A New Concept to the world that's why it fails so often uh we do a garbage job presenting new information into the world a lot of the time and that's what happened with pansexual it was a lot of failed communication in the queer Community about what pansexuality is and what it meant and how it was changing our understanding of sexuality um and it just failed to be adopted as a result I mean there are pansexuals but overall the terminology was not as widely adopted as most people just stayed bisexual including me um yeah what do you think do you think that there are really genuinely two entirely distinct sexualities with no overlap or do you think it's kind of just a messy blob I think it's more of a messy blob uh and they're kind of describing generally the same phenomenon and people can just identify whoever they want uh regardless of that and bisexual and pansexual are both fine words they're both fine uh omnisexual polysexual it's it's all fine uh let me know what you think though do you think that those are all entirely separate distinct categories if you think that I'm wrong uh if you have any death threats for me yeah let me know let me know what you think I'm going to get cancelled for this video cancel me Daddy

Channel: Trash Discourse

Views: 2,661

Keywords: Bisexual, Pansexual, Bi, Pan, Bi vs Pan, Bi/Pan Debate, Bisexual Vs Pansexual, Are Bisexual and Pansexual Different, Bisexuality, Pansexuality, Queer, Biphobia, Homophobia, Gay, LGBTQ+, LGBT, LGB, trans, transphobia, transgender, microlabels, identity, identity politics, tumblr, queer history, bisexual history, aids, the x files, x files, omnisexual, polysexual

Id: P0L8RSr_Kvk

Length: 41min 9sec (2469 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2024