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Candlewhisper Archive wrote:

Pansexual is when kitchenware turns you on right?

Middle Barael wrote:

Can someone please suppress this post? And no, it is when your are straight, bi, gay/lesbian, and everything in between, essentially the whole spectrum, hence “pan”.

Octopus islands wrote:

I don't really understand why pansexual needs to be differentiated from bisexual. I've never met a person who identifies as bisexual that says they would never date a non-binary person. It means you are attracted to both sexes, and outside of very niche cases, everyone has one of the two sexes (including transgender and non-binary people).

Quite right, in my humble working opinion. Think of the handedness thing: should I say that I'm "left-handed" because if someone sees me writing on a desk, it will be with my left hand? Or should I up the ante and say that I'm ambidextrous, just because I write with both on the whiteboard? Or should I insist that I'm "ambi-horizontal-sinistra-vertical-handed" because I write downward with my left hand but outward with either hand? While some polished up version of "ambihorizontosinistraverticalous" is the most accurate thing and the most "me" thing, it reaches a point where I'm doing more harm than good if I'm talking to the 90% of the population that's just right handed or the 10% that's just left handed. Especially if all I'm going for is to be left alone and to maybe get a left-handed desk in each classroom.

I realize that all of these terms describe at least the one individual who first articulated the specific concept, and so therefore they do apply to real, actual people, but nevertheless, easy, touchable, memorable terms for people that function as useful shortcuts can really expedite things. So I'm just a gay guy. Or I'm part of the LGBT+ group, or whatever you want to say about me. But I would not personally be offended if someone quipped "does gay mean you're only attracted to happy people, or that you only feel attraction when you're happy?" Idk.

Now something intentionally harmful, spoken in malice, that's obviously different. But word-play, circumstantially and with the proper intentions, is not harmful, I don't think. I mean, does being straight mean you're only attracted to standing people with good posture? ;-)

I think that part of what makes all of these things so thorny ("these things" being issues of speech, and whether something is a joke/insult/acceptable/unacceptable) is that the equation involves both a speaker and a receiver. Part of what matters is how words affect the person hearing them, but part of the equation is also the thought process, intentions, and understanding of the speaker. When my grandfather says some rather archaic things about different groups in private conversation with me, I internally wince, outwardly smirk, and seldom say anything, because of our relationship, his worldview, and the fact that he is one of the best individuals I know who has flawlessly evolved in his own thinking to accommodate my being gay. On the other hand, I won't tolerate bullshit from someone who is trying to harm someone else, obviously.

So if someone said "I'm pansexual," and someone else said, "lol you dummy, does that mean the frying pan or the baking pan turns you on?", then that would obviously be mean-spirited and therefore wrong. On the other hand, if the word "pansexual" was referenced in a conversation, and someone made a pun on the word for its English and Greek split meanings, that would be a joke, to me. In the many shades of gray, if that joke consequently turned out to really bother someone, then that's a conversation, and that's where things get more involved and ideally more personal and nuanced, based on how the situation evolves.

As Darths and Droids alluded to, I think that sometimes the oversimplification and absolute division into "perfectly enlightened/woke" statements and "horrendously evil/ignorant" statements makes many people just kind of mentally shrink back from the whole thing, instead of engaging with the issue at hand and trying to grow. If you will rise or fall entirely on how your statements are perceived with no regard or consideration for your own intentions or mindset or for the general context, then disengagement, reflexive suspicion, or outright rejection are pretty normal human responses, I think. Not good responses, perhaps, but understandable ones.