The word pansexual was first coined by Freud's critics to mock his theories
When pan-sexualism appeared in print in 1914, it had nothing to do with whom a person loves. Opponents of Sigmund Freud used it to ridicule his supposed belief that the sex instinct drives all human activity, mental and physical. The modern meaning took most of the century to arrive.
Today pansexuality means attraction to people of any gender, or regardless of sex and gender identity, and some pansexual people describe themselves as gender-blind. The prefix comes from the Greek for all. A near-twin, omnisexual, uses the Latin equivalent; when the two are separated, pansexual stresses that gender does not matter to the attraction, while omnisexual stresses attraction across the whole range of genders. Oddly, omnisexual has a Brazilian pedigree: in an 1878 newspaper review signed with a pseudonym, the novelist Machado de Assis used it to describe the frank eroticism of a novel by Eça de Queirós.
The sense of an orientation emerged gradually. By the 1970s pansexual was attested as a kind of attraction, and a bisexual anthology notes that pansexual people have been part of bisexual communities since then. It settled as an identity label in the 1990s, and the social psychologist Nikki Hayfield notes early use in BDSM circles. In 2010 Jasper Varney posted the pansexual flag on Tumblr, with pink for attraction to women, cyan for men and yellow for non-binary people.
The label sits in a lively argument with bisexuality. By dictionary logic the bi- prefix suggests two, and some pansexual people see their term as more inclusive of intersex and non-binary partners. Many bisexual people and organisations reply that bisexual has long meant attraction to more than one gender, and the scholar Shiri Eisner argues the charge of binary thinking has little to do with how bisexual people actually live. A 2017 study in the Journal of Bisexuality found no difference in how the two groups talked about sex or gender, undercutting the stereotype.
Researchers such as Corey Flanders now often speak of a bisexual umbrella covering bisexual, pansexual, queer and fluid identities, a grouping that gains solidarity but risks splintering into ever smaller subgroups.
Source: Pansexuality
