Actress and singer Monica Dogra came out as a pansexual last year. The 39-year-old revealed her sexual orientation while promoting her drama series, The Married Woman, at the Awadh Queer Pride in Lucknow. In a recent interview, she shared her journey as a pansexual person. Speaking to Hindustan Times, Dogra said that she had only ever heard the word pansexual some five or six years ago and thought that it described her. The Dhobi Ghat actress added that earlier sexual orientations were very black and white. “Either you were gay or you were straight. And if you were gay you certainly weren’t accepted or celebrated. Gay was even a slang word connoting something bad. It was so twisted,” she said.
Terms like homosexual bisexual, and pansexual have become more visible with awareness among people.
Still many are not clear about what these words mean, let’s break down the difference between bisexual and pansexual:
Pansexual
According to the Human Rights Campaign, a pansexual person “has the potential for emotional, romantic, or sexual attraction to people of any gender.” The term pansexual consists of two words: pan and sexual. Pan means all, so pansexuality means sexual attraction to a variety of, or all, genders.
It should be noted that pansexuality falls under the larger “bi+ umbrella.” Pansexuality is indeed a facet of bisexuality, but the term means something different than just an attraction to multiple genders.
Bisexual
A bisexual person is someone who can be attracted to more than one gender. People who identify as bisexual are attracted to genders like theirs and different from theirs. Queer therapist and coach Morgan Thomas tells Cosmopolitan that a bisexual person may have gender preferences in regard to connecting sexually, whereas a pansexual person does not usually consider gender into account but focuses on other aspects of a person.
It should be noted that a pansexual person can be attracted to their own gender as well as people from other genders. However, for a pansexual person it is not someone’s gender that determines whether or not they want to date someone.
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