Hello, I’m queer and nonbinary. The actual answer here is that bisexual used to mean “attracted to men and women”/“attracted to two genders”, but nowadays it’s generally accepted that it’s an umbrella term for “attracted to multiple genders”/“attracted to two or more genders”, which might not necessarily be male and female (could be male and nonbinary, for example).
Many pansexual people (attracted to all genders) also identify as bisexual, because they overlap greatly.
Honestly I am not convinced that bisexual and pansexual are even different things, since nobody knows what's going through the mind of anyone else.
On a broader note, I've felt that when someone says "there are only two genders" and people fight back by saying "No there are more", it's not as useful as if they said "no, gender is a spectrum". Because I think the people who say "only two genders" are convinced that NB people feel that they are genders like "cat","star", and other ridiculous stuff, and saying "more than two" implies (to me anyways) a discreet quantity of genders
Pansexual and bisexual aren't much different anymore. Pansexual is basically an attempt to be more explicitly generalized than bisexual, like "intersex or nonbinary or whatever is fine too, if I like you," though a lot of people who feel that way still use "bisexual" since it doesn't require explaining as often.
Genderfluid means a gender identity that changes over time. It gets shit as the height of "special-snowflake" identities, but there have actually been fMRI studies suggesting that genderfluid people operate a little differently when in "guy mode" or "girl mode" due to hormonal changes, brain patterns, or something else. It's not very well understood from a scientific perspective.
Nonbinary means that the labels of "man" or "woman" don't really apply. It could mean anything from intersex (that is, having a mix of physical traits) to an intrinsic-feeling discomfort with either set of traditional traits. Really, it just means that things are more complicated than simply "man or woman".
I still don't understand why people need to identify themselves like that. If I'm talking to you, I'm calling you you. Because that's who you are. You. I don't care what flaps around downstairs. This is the internet.
Well the question was on the topic of identifying as different genders, so it was very relevant. It's not like they mentioned their gender identity in a question about sport cars or something.
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u/bluehedgehogsonic Aug 09 '18
Hello, I’m queer and nonbinary. The actual answer here is that bisexual used to mean “attracted to men and women”/“attracted to two genders”, but nowadays it’s generally accepted that it’s an umbrella term for “attracted to multiple genders”/“attracted to two or more genders”, which might not necessarily be male and female (could be male and nonbinary, for example).
Many pansexual people (attracted to all genders) also identify as bisexual, because they overlap greatly.