this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Actually didn't know that, even though I identify as bi lol. Pretty sure my other bi and pan friends didn't know either from the kinds of discussions we've had. But then that's just a bad choice linguistically, no? It's very misleading because you literally have the terms bi and non-bi and you need to read some manifesto to understand that they're not a contradiction. Meanwhile aside from the stupid overdone cookware joke, I think nobody ever questioned the meanings of terms like pan or omni, because they make sense linguistically.
Homosexual is attraction to the same gender; heterosexual is attraction to a different gender. The bi in bisexual is both of these, not attraction to two genders. Think of the bi flag, pink, purple, and blue: what do you think the colors represent? Nonbinary people have always been included in bisexual if you take some time to think about.
I don't doubt your textbook correctness or the historical correctness of this, and maybe I should stress that I am not trying to exclude anyone from the bi term, but at least in my anecdotal experience, these terms are mostly used "wrongly", meaning that there is a lot of confusion. And the meanings of words change as people start using them with different intended meanings.
Therefore, given the premise that we want to simplify things by cleaning up some redundant terms, I would prefer to keep the one whose meaning is intuitively clear to everyone. I just don't see why - given bi, pan and omni all mean the same thing - one should choose the most misunderstood/misused term.
Personally, I would just keep the terms and let people choose whichever they like, I'm just trying to entertain this discussion of choosing to keep only one of them and the pros/cons for each choice.