Bisexuality and Pansexuality: Orientations Beyond the Binary

The Sexuality Spectrum

Estimated reading time: 18 minutes

Reader promise: This article provides an accurate, research-informed educational guide to bisexuality and pansexuality: what each orientation involves, how they are similar and how they differ, what the research shows about bisexual identity and wellbeing, what bisexual erasure is and why it matters, and what professionals need to understand about these communities.

Neither Gay Nor Straight, and Why That Matters

Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 survey of American sexual behaviour produced a result that, seventy-five years later, has still not been fully absorbed into the popular imagination: the vast majority of people do not fall neatly at the endpoints of a heterosexual/homosexual binary. Kinsey’s scale, which placed sexual and romantic orientation on a zero to six continuum from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual, with five gradations of bisexual orientation between the poles, was designed specifically because the available language was inadequate to describe the diversity the data revealed. That inadequacy has not been resolved. The most widely used orientations that describe attraction beyond the simple binary, bisexuality and pansexuality, remain among the least understood, most stigmatised, and most inadequately served in both research and clinical practice. This article provides accurate understanding of both.

Defining Bisexuality

Bisexuality describes the experience of sexual and/or romantic attraction to people of more than one gender. Contemporary usage most commonly understands bisexuality as attraction to people of the same gender and people of different genders, with the understanding that this does not require equal attraction to each or attraction to all genders. The bisexual community’s own long-standing definition, from the Bisexual Manifesto of 1990, states that bisexuality refers to attraction to people of your own gender and other genders, acknowledging that gender is not binary and that bisexual attraction is not constrained to a male-female binary.

Bisexuality is the most commonly reported non-heterosexual orientation in population research, appearing consistently more prevalent than exclusively homosexual orientations across studies. The proportion of adults identifying as bisexual in population surveys has increased substantially over the past two decades, particularly among younger generations and women, a pattern attributed primarily to reduced stigma and greater availability of vocabulary rather than to genuine increases in the prevalence of bisexual orientation.

Bisexuality exists on a spectrum. Some bisexual people are equally attracted to people of the same and different genders; others experience stronger attraction in one direction with occasional attraction in another. Some bisexual people are in monogamous relationships with one partner and may not be currently acting on the full range of their orientation; their bisexual identity is no less valid because their current relationship happens to be with a partner of one gender. Some bisexual people are in polyamorous or open relationship structures that allow them to engage with their full range of attraction. The diversity of ways in which bisexuality is lived makes any single summary description inadequate.

Defining Pansexuality

Pansexuality describes attraction to people regardless of gender: an orientation in which the gender of a potential partner is not a significant factor in attraction. The prefix pan (from the Greek for all) reflects this gender-inclusive quality. Pansexual people may be attracted to men, women, non-binary people, transgender people, and gender-nonconforming people without any of these categories functioning as a limiting criterion. The experience of attraction is oriented toward specific people rather than toward people of specific genders.

Pansexuality as an explicitly named and adopted identity became more widely used from the 1990s onward, partly in response to increasing social visibility of non-binary and gender-nonconforming identities. Some people prefer the term pansexual over bisexual because they feel it better reflects an attraction that genuinely does not recognise gender as a category: for them, bisexual, with its prefix suggesting two, implies a binary that does not reflect their experience. Others use bisexual and pansexual interchangeably, or use both as co-equal descriptors of the same general orientation.

How They Overlap and How They Differ

The relationship between bisexuality and pansexuality is sometimes described as categorical, with pansexuality defined as inherently gender-blind in a way that bisexuality supposedly is not. This characterisation is disputed by many bisexual people and researchers who note that contemporary bisexuality’s own definition is explicitly gender-inclusive. The practical difference between bisexuality and pansexuality, if one exists, tends to be more a matter of emphasis and community affiliation than a sharp conceptual boundary.

In practice, many people who are attracted to people of multiple or all genders hold both identities simultaneously, or move between them over time, or use one specifically because of the community and history it connects them to. Bisexuality has a longer history as a named identity with an established community and political movement; pansexuality is more recently articulated and may appeal particularly to people whose experience of gender is itself more fluid or non-binary. Neither is more correct than the other as a description of multi-gender attraction, and the decision about which, if either, to use is a personal one.

Bisexual Erasure

Bisexual erasure refers to the tendency, widespread in both heterosexual and homosexual communities and contexts, to deny, ignore, or delegitimise bisexuality as a genuine stable orientation. Its manifestations include the claim that bisexuality is a phase or a transitional identity on the way to declaring as gay or heterosexual; the assumption that a bisexual person is gay when in a same-sex relationship and straight when in a different-sex relationship; the suggestion that bisexual people are fundamentally indecisive, greedy, unable to commit, or more likely to be unfaithful; the dismissal of bisexual identity as invalid unless the person is currently in or pursuing relationships with people of multiple genders; and the simple social invisibility produced when people assume that any relationship involves a straight person and a gay person and never consider that either might be bisexual.

Bisexual erasure occurs within LGBTQ+ communities as well as in heterosexual contexts, and bisexual people consistently report experiencing biphobia from both sides of the assumed binary. The consequences of erasure are not merely symbolic: the invisibility and delegitimisation of bisexual identity produce specific mental health challenges that are well-documented in the research literature and that are associated with the experience of being between categories rather than with any feature of bisexuality itself.

Mental Health and Bisexuality

Research consistently documents elevated rates of mental health difficulties among bisexual people compared with both heterosexual and exclusively homosexual people, a pattern known as the bisexual health disparity. Bisexual people show higher rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidal ideation than both comparison groups in multiple national and international surveys. The explanation for this pattern is not in bisexuality itself but in the specific social stressors to which bisexual people are disproportionately exposed: erasure, biphobia from both heterosexual and gay communities, reduced social support due to lower community belonging and visibility, and the specific psychological weight of having an identity that both dominant social scripts (heterosexual and gay) fail to recognise or accommodate.

The bisexual health disparity has direct clinical implications. Healthcare providers, therapists, and mental health professionals who assume that non-heterosexual sexual minority patients face similar risks regardless of their specific orientation will systematically under-identify the elevated risk faced by bisexual patients. Accurate clinical assessment should include inquiry into the specific stressors associated with bisexual identity, including experiences of erasure and biphobia, and should address these as the actual sources of distress rather than treating the orientation itself as the clinical concern.

Bisexuality, Pansexuality, and BDSM

Research on BDSM communities consistently documents higher prevalence of non-heterosexual orientations among practitioners compared with the general population, and the BDSM community has historically been notably inclusive of bisexual and pansexual people. Richters and colleagues (2008) found that BDSM practitioners were significantly more likely to be non-heterosexual than non-practitioners in the national Australian survey. The reasons for this association are not fully understood but likely reflect multiple factors: BDSM communities’ explicit culture of non-judgment around sexual diversity, the cross-gender dimensions of some BDSM practices and communities, and the possibility that people who are already oriented to exploring non-normative aspects of sexuality are more likely to explore multiple dimensions of that non-normativity.

Bisexual and pansexual people in BDSM communities navigate the same challenges as bisexual and pansexual people anywhere: bisexual erasure, assumptions about orientation based on the visible gender of current partners, and the mental health burdens associated with biphobia and invisibility. BDSM community culture’s general inclusiveness is not a perfect buffer against these challenges, and practitioners should be aware of them as specific dimensions of diversity within their communities.

Myths and Misconceptions

Myth: Bisexuality is a phase or transitional identity.
Reality: Research documents bisexuality as a stable orientation for many people over extended periods. It is not a marker of confusion or indecision.
Myth: Bisexual people in a relationship with one gender are no longer bisexual.
Reality: Orientation is not determined by current relationship. A bisexual person in a long-term different-sex relationship is still bisexual. Erasure of identity based on current relationship status is one of the most common forms of biphobia.
Myth: Pansexuality and bisexuality describe the same thing.
Reality: There is substantial overlap and many people use both terms, but they have distinct emphases and communities, and the choice between them is personal and meaningful to those who make it.
Myth: Bisexual people have the same mental health profile as gay or lesbian people.
Reality: Research documents specific elevated mental health challenges for bisexual people compared with both heterosexual and gay populations, attributable to bisexual-specific stressors including erasure and biphobia from multiple directions.

What Professionals Need to Understand

Healthcare providers, therapists, and counsellors need to understand bisexuality and pansexuality as distinct identities with specific clinical considerations. Key principles include: not assuming orientation based on the apparent gender of a patient’s current partner; recognising the elevated mental health risk associated specifically with bisexual identity and addressing its social sources rather than treating the orientation as the clinical concern; avoiding bisexual erasure in clinical language, including using affirmative bisexual or pansexual vocabulary when clients use it themselves; and understanding that bisexual people may experience biphobia in contexts that are supposedly safe for LGBTQ+ people, including therapy itself if the therapist holds unexamined assumptions about bisexuality.

Reader Reflection

The Kinsey scale was published over seventy-five years ago. Its central finding, that human sexual orientation is distributed along a continuum rather than neatly at two poles, was not a radical theoretical claim but an empirical finding that the data produced. If the field of sexuality studies has spent the decades since then gradually catching up with Kinsey’s data, and if culture and institutions are catching up rather more slowly still, then understanding bisexuality and pansexuality as genuinely existing, genuinely stable, and genuinely challenging to the binary framework that most social institutions still assume is simply the continuation of work that has been ongoing for three quarters of a century. It is worth noticing how much catching up remains to be done.

Practical Takeaways

Bisexuality describes attraction to people of the same and different genders; pansexuality describes attraction regardless of gender. Both are stable, legitimate orientations with their own communities and histories.
Bisexual erasure is a specific and widespread form of biphobia that affects people from both heterosexual and gay communities and produces specific mental health burdens.
Research documents specific elevated mental health risks for bisexual people compared with both heterosexual and gay populations, attributable to bisexual-specific social stressors rather than to the orientation itself.
BDSM communities show higher prevalence of non-heterosexual orientations including bisexuality and pansexuality, consistent with the communities’ broader cultures of sexual diversity and non-judgment.
Clinical practice should address bisexual-specific stressors rather than treating the orientation as the clinical concern, and should use affirmative language consistent with the client’s own identity vocabulary.

References

Kinsey, A.C., Pomeroy, W.B., and Martin, C.E. (1948). Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. W.B. Saunders.
Richters, J., de Visser, R.O., Rissel, C.E., Grulich, A.E., and Smith, A.M.A. (2008). Demographic and psychosocial features of participants in bondage and discipline, “sadomasochism” or dominance and submission (BDSM): Data from a national survey. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 5(7), 1660-1668.
Selic, P. and Jug, B. (2025). Consensual BDSM: An updated examination of characteristics, health outcomes, and the role of stigma. Behavioral Sciences, 15(6), 813.