Stonewall don't believe in same-sex attraction.

You can't campaign for equality about something where no one recognises what it is you are supposed to be gaining equality for.

I couldn't care less if there is a word for a person who is attracted to personalities irrespective of sex.

As long as you don't go taking funds for, or are pretending you are campaigning on behalf of, people whose sexual orientation is based on sex.

Bi: "I don't care what sex you are" vs
Pan: "I don't care what sex you think you are".

I also don’t understand how I’m supposed to be attracted to a gender, it being a personal and subjective feeling.

Agreed; being attracted to a particular type of gender identity sounds a bit of an impossibility (though I'm going to try to make sense of it in the next paragraph). But it's perfectly possible to be attracted to either gender-conforming or gender-non-conforming people - some lesbians only go for butches, some for femmes, some for an androgynous look, and some aren't fussed either way; and there are plenty of straight women who only fancy men who do the stereotypical-masculine thing of short hair and trousers, and aren't remotely attracted to men in floral dresses and eyeliner.

The sense I can find in there is: we have this model of attraction that puts the physical body first and foremost, and assumes that attraction to the body comes first. For some people, this may be true; for others it's not the case, and the determining factor is effectively personality.

But then they go and muddle it all up with absolute batshittery like: bisexual is offensive because it connotes there are only two sexes and the underlying valid point - that we are forcing everyone into a model of sexuality based on the experience of the typical heterosexual male - is lost amongst the bickering.

FWIW my best mate is bisexual and gets proper pissy whenever anyone tries to tell her she's pan, or queer, or anything else. She's happy with bi and feels it describes her proclivities perfectly well, and doesn't want to be forcibly reidentified. And she doesn't fancy woks either.

How can they campaign against homophobia when, according to them, it doesn't exist.

According to the NI hate crime legislation, homophobia includes transphobia

bi means two but then if 2 + 2 can sometimes equals 5, there's a shed load of shit in where all of this is going. I'm looking forward to the knots everyone ties themselves in and how offensive it's all going to become (instead of the lovely equal world as envisaged).

There’s also a lot of controversy about what bisexual means, and some think that bisexual is offensive because it connotes there are only two sexes. My local lgbtq group has got rid of bisexual meet ups and replaced it with “queer” meetings. There’s now great confusion about what bisexual means. Some say it’s attraction to your own gender and any other gender. Some say it’s attraction to 2 or more genders. And some say it’s attraction to all genders , or to people regardless of gender. But it’s now seen as exclusionary to say that it means attracted to male and females. And if we look at stonewall they have fully adopted this:” Bi is an umbrella term used to describe a romantic and/or sexual orientation towards more than one gender.”

This is bizarre though. If we agree with gender theory there are literally thousands of genders. So wouldn’t that make most people bisexual? I also don’t understand how I’m supposed to be attracted to a gender, it being a personal and subjective feeling.

They do seem to, Errol, yeah.

My objection to that is that they're effectively divvying up the world into "boring cishet vanilla" and "everything else" and positioning the two in a hierarchy to claim oppressed status.

Which is bollocks, cos that umbrella term might cover homosexuals, but it also covers eg straight blokes with perverse sexual appetites, who in fact form the dominant class in terms of sex and sexuality as an axis of oppression.

Plus it's a bit binary; all about defining yourself as the Other.

The term 'gay' is more generally used.

I got the impression that a lot of younger lesbians (along with anyone else who wants to) use 'queer' nowadays?

Sandy is a genius.

Seeing the above has made me remember this, also from Sandy....

Ta, Gasp0de - my day is made!

Here you go, Tyro.

I can see I'm going to end up playing devil's advocate on this thread!

If you're only attracted to one sex then the sex of potential partners matters. If you're capable of being attracted to both then their sex doesn't come into the equation, yet you're required to declare an orientation based on this thing that you experience as an irrelevance.

Obviously (as nauticant points out) some people use the word to disguise a heterosexual orientation. But some people use it because they don't have a sexual orientation in the traditional sense.

Stonewall: HomoGENDERals are allowed ....HomoSEXuals are transphobic 🙄

Stonewall science: Queer theory. SEX is a social construct. Gender identity is real

Stonewall mission: Abolish sex based rights.

So, theoretically, if the pansexual feels attracted to the asexual, there's a dilemma! Surely someone is going to hear the word 'no' spoken. Won't that be panphobia?

Pansexual - Someone who is bisexual but believes in gender stereotypes and thinks bisexual is boring and old fashioned.

Pansexual often means a young woman who is attracted both to men who have a masculine presentation and men who (sometimes) have a feminine presentation.

While I wait for the cartoon - I suspect pansexual came about because bisexual carries certain baggage due to being characterised with reference to monosexual attractions.

We say homosexuals are attracted to their own sex and heterosexuals are attracted to the opposite sex ergo bisexuals are attracted to both sexes.

Meanwhile there's a shitload of people out there scratching their heads and thinking "But I'm not attracted to a sex; a person's sex is utterly irrelevant to whether I fancy them."

This is usually referred to in scathing tones as "hearts before parts", which is a bit of a shitty and othering way to characterise other people's lack of a reproductive-sex-class orientation.

Pan means "I couldn't care less what sex you are".

Now just waiting for the obligatory post of the Sandy Draws Badly take on pansexualism. It's always good for a giggle.

pretendy

Love that word!

I thought when put into proper terms, "pansexual" means attracted to people irrespective of their sex. Clearly we already have the word "bisexual" for that but in this time of pretendy definitions, that would "exclude" people who claim to have no sex by virtue of being "gender fluid" or "non-binary".

The amusing thing about "pansexual" is that I suspect most of them are heterosexual but are embarrassed to be so mundane.

"Pansexual" is attraction to "any gender" (regardless of sex). As opposed to "same gender" (regardless of sex).

Surely their definition of homosexual is more a definition of pansexual? Or have I misunderstood what pansexual is?

The term 'gay' is more generally used.

Does this piss anyone else off? I grew up with the understanding that gay implied male and the female equivalent was lesbian. Now the latter's seen as a dirty word (unless used by men to describe themselves) and women are expected to shift to using the male variant.

It's the same old pattern of male as default and female as degraded other; when problems arise (as they always do because of that underlying assumption of female=other) we're expected to adjust our language so the male-variant becomes the human-variant and the female-variant becomes verboten.

How can they campaign against homophobia when, according to them, it doesn't exist.

Their entire raison d'etre has gone. They should not be funded, or solicit funds, on the basis of something they say doesn't exist.