Grumpy Cat
Well-Known Member
Again, I only found out about pansexuality when I googled it today, but as I understand it, the bit that extends it beyond bisexual is the slightly more unusual cases, such as a hermaphrodite, or perhaps a pre-operative transsexual. To use the example of a person with male genitalia who acts and identifies as a woman: somebody interested in men would be turned off by the dressing and identifying as a woman; someone interested in women would be put off by the male genitalia; a bisexual - AS I UNDERSTAND IT, I could be wrong about this - would like either a male or a female, but not the cloudy inbetween; and, finally, a pansexual would be unconcerned about any cloudy gender definitions.
Anybody can feel free to correct me on this, as I'm just learning this stuff today. But that seems to me to be the underlying difference. Of course, you can easily generalize things by sticking with hetero-/homo-/bi-/a-sexual, in the same way (to use an example close to our hearts) that you could generalize the autism spectrum by simply uniting everybody underneath the banner "autism spectrum". The more defined categories, like pansexual and all the others listed, would be more akin to going deeper within the category and further defining it - in the case of our example, that'd be like going deeper than "autism spectrum" and getting into terms like "classic autism", "PDD NOS", and, of course, "Aspergers' Syndrome".
Does that sound like it makes sense? Or is that a bad comparison? Again, I'm only today figuring this stuff out myself, so please don't take offense if I'm way off the mark with any of that, but feel free to correct and give me alternatives.
No, that helped a lot. I'll stick with the hetero-/homo-/bi-/a-sexual - it's a lot less confusing.