Pansexuality

Pansexuality is sexual, romantic, or emotional attraction towards people of all genders, or regardless of their sex or gender identity. Pansexual people might 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. 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". The prefix pan- comes from the Ancient Greek πᾶν (), meaning "all, every". 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.