Pansexuality is sexual, romantic, or emotional attraction towards people of all genders, or regardless of their sex or gender identity. Pansexual people may refer to themselves as gender-blind, asserting that gender and sex are not determining factors in their romantic or sexual attraction to others. Pansexuality is sometimes considered a sexual orientation in its own right or, at other times, as a branch of bisexuality (since attraction to all genders falls under the category of attraction to people of the same gender and different genders) to indicate a lack of gender preference. While pansexual people are open to relationships with people who do not identify as strictly men or women, and pansexuality therefore explicitly rejects the gender binary in terms of the chosen etymology, this is by no means a feature which is exclusive to pansexuality and can also be found in broad definitions of homosexuality, bisexuality and the asexual spectrum.
History and etymology The prefix pan- comes from the Ancient Greek πᾶν (pan), meaning "all, every". Pansexuality is also sometimes called omnisexuality. Omnisexuality may be used to describe those "attracted to people of all genders across the gender spectrum", and pansexuality may be used to describe the same people, or those attracted to people "regardless of gender". Pansexuality and omnisexuality are sometimes considered synonymous, but when a distinction is made between them, the former term emphasizes gender blindness, while the latter emphasizes the role of gender in attraction. In 1878, Machado de Assis, a renowned Brazilian writer of the 19th century, made one of the first known uses to date in Portuguese of the term omnisexual for his criticism of the novel O Primo de Basílio by Eça de Queirós. The review was published in the newspaper of the time, O Cruzeiro, which, on April 16, 1878, featured a review signed by Eleazar, the pseudonym of Machado de Assis, on the cover of the newspaper. De Assis classified the naturalism and lack of sexual filter present in the novel as "reminiscences and allusions of an eroticism that Proudhon would call omnisexual and omnimod". Early individuals who displayed pansexual tendencies include John Wilmot and Friedrich Schiller. Although later attributed to Shulamith Firestone, the hybrid words pansexual and pansexualism were first attested in 1914 (spelled "pan-sexualism"), coined by opponents of Sigmund Freud to denote the idea "that the sex instinct plays the primary part in all human activity, mental and physical". The term was translated to German as Pansexualismus in Freud's work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. The word pansexual is attested as a term for a variety of attraction, alongside omnisexual (coming from the Latin omnis, "all") and the earlier bisexual, by the 1970s. Bi Any Other Name states that "pansexual people have been actively involved in the bisexual community since the 1970s." The term pansexuality emerged as a term for a sexual identity or sexual orientation in the 1990s, "to describe desires that already existed for many people". Social psychologist Nikki Hayfield states that the term saw early use in BDSM communities. In 2010, the pansexual flag was posted on a Tumblr blog to represent the pansexual community. It was designed by Jasper Varney. The colors are intended to represent attraction and gender spectrum, with cyan for attraction to men, pink for attraction to women, and yellow for attraction to non-binary people. Variations on the term pansexual are beginning to appear. For example, panqueer, a blend word of pansexual and queer, has been used by participants in a study on non-medical impacts of COVID-19.
Comparison to bisexuality and other sexual identities
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