It’s surfaced more recently in popular culture, with celebrities like singer-songwriter Janelle Monae using it to describe their sexual orientations.Ī volunteer and youth ambassador for the LGBTQ+ charity Just Like Us, based in London, Ella Deregowska, 23, sees pansexuality as “almost the most open term I can find with regards to explaining sexual attraction”, she says. Having emerged as a concept roughly a century ago to more broadly describe the role sexuality plays in people’s lives, the meaning of pansexuality has shifted significantly over the years. These days, instead of thinking much about their partners’ or potential partners’ genders, identifying as pansexual for Eaves means focusing on other aspects of their partners’ identities, like “their values, their demeanours, the way they treat me, whether we have shared interests or goals”, they say. “It allowed me to get out of the binaries that, in US culture, we’re kind of indoctrinated into.”
“I feel like my gender changes, because of that I’ve been able to think of more things as a spectrum,” they explain. For them, that realisation went hand-in-hand with identifying as pansexual. Then, as a clinical social worker providing therapy for “trans and queer folk” in North Carolina, US, they began learning new terms for describing sexual orientations, like ‘pansexual’, that they hadn’t considered using before.Īround the same time, Eaves, who uses ‘they/them’ pronouns, was also realising that their gender identity was non-binary (in other words, not female or male). Mariel Eaves, 34, long knew they were attracted to “people of various genders”, but hadn’t thought too much about what that meant for their identity until about six years ago.
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