To be clear, that wasn’t my point at all… I think it’s perfectly fine for people to use whatever words they want for themselves, and to describe their sexuality with those words however they please.
My point is moreso that attempting to separate pansexual and bisexual beyond the individual level is useless because they aren’t meaningfully distinct concepts. People can pick one or the other or neither and use it in whatever sense they want, but the problem arises when they try to generalize their pet definition to others. You see people in this thread arguing about the definition, saying “I think this is what it means” and then someone else comes in and says “no you’re wrong it doesn’t mean that”. Some of the people saying that are because the definition was transphobic or something, but some of them are just disagreeing about the definition.
I think this is all a nonsense prescriptivist debate with no relation to reality (which is part of the appeal of course, but still). People just argue what they think the word should mean rather than thinking about how it’s actually used. And if you think about how it’s used, I don’t think it’s possible to separate the two. One person’s pansexual is another person’s bisexual.
You’re saying it doesn’t matter except on the individual level, but if you don’t want people sharing their actual, individual usage of the word, how could we ever be descriptivist?
To be clear, that wasn’t my point at all… I think it’s perfectly fine for people to use whatever words they want for themselves, and to describe their sexuality with those words however they please.
My point is moreso that attempting to separate pansexual and bisexual beyond the individual level is useless because they aren’t meaningfully distinct concepts. People can pick one or the other or neither and use it in whatever sense they want, but the problem arises when they try to generalize their pet definition to others. You see people in this thread arguing about the definition, saying “I think this is what it means” and then someone else comes in and says “no you’re wrong it doesn’t mean that”. Some of the people saying that are because the definition was transphobic or something, but some of them are just disagreeing about the definition.
I think this is all a nonsense prescriptivist debate with no relation to reality (which is part of the appeal of course, but still). People just argue what they think the word should mean rather than thinking about how it’s actually used. And if you think about how it’s used, I don’t think it’s possible to separate the two. One person’s pansexual is another person’s bisexual.
You’re saying it doesn’t matter except on the individual level, but if you don’t want people sharing their actual, individual usage of the word, how could we ever be descriptivist?