The Beginner’s Guide to Pansexuality: Meaning, Misconceptions and Examples from the Community

While more people are talking about pansexuality and what it means to be pansexual , its definition is still misunderstood by many both inside and outside the queer community. To help navigate the ever-evolving landscape of LGBTQIA+ identities , as well as validate the feelings of those who have an affinity with this label, we’ve created our beginner’s guide to pansexuality. 

Here you’ll find all the answers to FAQs about being pansexual, common misconceptions about pansexuality and what being pan means to those in the community themselves. If you’re new here, remember – pansexuality is real, perfectly normal and beautiful. 

In simple terms, pansexuality means being attracted to people regardless of their gender. Many pansexual folk also describe themselves as being attracted to others based on their personality, not gender.

You might also see the term ‘panromantic’ being used in some contexts. This refers to romantic attraction regardless of gender, rather than sexual attraction.

One of the common misconceptions about pansexuality is that pansexual folk are attracted to everyone they meet. However, just like how a heterosexual woman isn’t attracted to every male she meets, this simply isn’t true!

Generally speaking, bisexuality refers to an attraction to more than one gender, whereas pansexuality is an attraction regardless of gender. While pansexuality and bisexuality are subtly different, some queer individuals may use these terms interchangeably while others feel the differentiation is important.

Fans of Schitts Creek might remember the wine analogy David gives to Stevie after they first sleep together. When asked if David prefers red or white wine (symbolising men and women respectively), he replies, “I like the wine, not the label” – a great way to describe pansexuality.

Get a glimpse of how many people in the world identify as pansexual with the following statistics:

• In the UK Census 2021, 48,000 people wrote ‘pansexual’ when they ticked “other sexual orientation” in the survey. This identity was the most commonly manually written-in response. [ONS]

• 1% of the global population on average identifies as pansexual, with the United States being the country with the highest percentage of pansexual individuals. [IPSOS]
  
  

• Pansexual individuals in New Zealand are younger, more likely to be gender diverse and more likely to be from the indigenous Māori ethnic group than bisexual individuals. [National Library of Medicine]

The term pansexual has been part of LGBTQ+ history since at least the early 1900s when Sigmund Freud mentioned ‘pansexualism’ in his medical literature. However, his initial usage differed significantly from how we understand pansexuality today.

In the early 1920s and 1930s, the concept of pansexuality as a distinct sexual orientation came to light. Reports of folk who "loved across labels and boundaries" began surfacing in Harlem and Chicago. Half a decade later, many started to use this term to describe identity and desire roughly the same way we do today. Eventually in the 1990s, pansexuality emerged as a distinct identity and community in its own right.

For language buffs looking to know when pansexuality became a thing, we can go back to the turn of the last century when the term first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary. Broken down, the prefix “pan” comes from the Greek prefix for “all.”

First adopted in 2010 on a Tumblr blog, the pansexual flag features three horizontal stripes in different colours. The pink, yellow and cyan stripes represent an attraction to women, non-binary people and men, respectively.

Many pansexual folk wear pansexual flag pins to celebrate their sexual identity. Pansexual Awareness and Visibility Day is also celebrated annually on May 24th as a way to raise awareness of pansexuality and fight stigma and prejudice towards pansexual and panromantic people.

Creating a clear-cut definition of pansexuality can be challenging, as the term might mean different things to different people. That’s why we’ve asked the pansexual community what this label means to them below.