For many pansexual people, forming queer community can start with exploring how to define your sexual orientation, connecting with people in similar positions, and choosing how and with whom to share all of this. This article will take a look at one research study into the different ways pansexual people form queer community.

I’m so excited to dive right into this research!! Nikki Hayfield & Karolína Křížová published a study in the Journal of Bisexuality in 2021 that explored how pansexual and panromantic people formed their identity. Their study looked at 80 adult participants from the United Kingdom, who responded to a call for pansexual and panromantic participants that went out on several forums and social media sites. 50 of the 60 participants who completed the demographic information were White.

Again, I call on researchers to include sexual and gender minority people of color! Recruit them on purpose please so that I can expand beyond talking about only white people’s experiences.

Defining Your Sexuality for Yourself

Regarding the fact that this was published in the Journal of Bisexuality: the authors copped to how difficult it is to draw a rigid boundary between bisexuality and pansexuality, pointing out that these distinctions are sometimes contradictory, and usually confusing. Sometimes the labels we choose are dependent on who we are sharing these labels with. As one younger participant in this study said, “I’ve heard people my age use "bisexual" around older family members, while still going as "pansexual" to close friends.”

And it’s not only age that makes the difference in how you share your identity. Citing the way bisexual is a more common and commonly accepted term than pansexual, Hayfield and Křížová put it this way: Pan labels like pansexual and panromantic can be useful for some people’s personal identities, while bi labels are used more “pragmatically, as public identifiers to broadly express and communicate identity to others.” Some of their participants used the terms bi and pan interchangeably, while others kept to strict personal distinctions.

Using the Internet to Form Community

One thing that did seem an almost universal quality: the work of finding out about the existence of these labels, or exploring them more deeply, happened largely online. The internet filled in the gaps for many participants, who noted the lack of inclusive or thorough education on these communities and these identity labels. A participant in her twenties added “My school only ever really talked about hetero relationships and at most maybe one or two gay relationships. Bi or pan people were never mentioned.” The social media website tumblr got several shoutouts, with multiple study participants noting how the website provided inclusive information and fellowship with other pansexual and panromantic people. Indeed, that was listed as one of the websites the authors used to recruit participants in the first place.

Prejudice as a Barrier to Building Queer Community

They didn’t only share about a lack of information in the real world compared to that particular corner of the internet. Participants also acknowledged social media as providing a safe haven from micro and sometimes macro instances of prejudice or discrimination which they faced in the offline world. While they reported facing some prejudice online, the general consensus was that social media networks, particularly tumblr, were much friendlier places to learn about these labels and share community. “The data is therefore most likely to only be transferable to those pansexual/panromantic people who participate in online communities, rather than necessarily being representative of any broader demographic.”

And for those of you wondering about the pan community in Finland, I am happy to report that the authors included information on a 2019 study of plurisexual youth. Their findings about the complexities of these definitions mirrored the above: the “boundaries between bisexuality and pansexuality were both dependent on context and somewhat fluid” according to this research as well.

If you’d like to find out more about how therapy can help explore these questions of identity, click here to learn more about therapy services at Full Focus Therapy. And there’s more information available about the difference LGBTQ+ friendly therapy can make here.