Bisexual vs pansexual vs omnisexual vs polysexual, explained

Bisexual means attraction to more than one gender. Pansexual means attraction in which gender is not what decides it. Omnisexual means attraction to all genders, with gender still noticed and still part of it. Polysexual means attraction to many genders, but not all of them. The four words sit under the same umbrella and overlap far more than online arguments suggest, and the differences that remain are narrow.

The four words side by side

Each word has a glossary entry with the full definition. Here they are side by side.

• Bisexual: attraction to more than one gender. It says how wide the attraction is, at least two genders and possibly all of them, and says nothing about what part gender plays.
• Pansexual: attraction to people of any gender, where gender is not what decides it. It covers the whole range and answers the second question too: gender is not the filter.
• Omnisexual: attraction to all genders, where gender stays visible and can shape how the attraction feels. Same range as pansexual, opposite answer about gender.
• Polysexual: attraction to many genders, but deliberately not all. It is the only one of the four that says the range has an edge.

Read that way, the words are not four steps on a ladder of openness. They answer two different questions. The first is how far the attraction reaches: more than one gender, many, or all. The second is what gender does inside it: decide, colour, or neither. Bisexual only answers the first question, which is why it can hold the other three, and why the Bisexual Resource Center, a bi organisation, lists pansexual, omnisexual and polysexual under its bi+ umbrella. It also notes that someone attracted to all genders, or regardless of gender, might call themselves bisexual too.

The same pairs exist for romantic attraction, for people whose romantic and sexual orientations do not match: panromantic and biromantic follow the same line as pansexual and bisexual.

Where the words came from

The earliest recorded uses of these words were about bodies, theories or other people, not about the speaker. They were picked up later by the people they now describe.

Bisexual: a word about bodies first

The Online Etymology Dictionary dates bisexual to 1824, when it meant having the organs of both sexes in one being, a sense used in biology and botany. The meaning of attraction to both sexes appears in an 1892 English translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and the adjective in that sense from 1914. According to the same dictionary, the word was not in general use until the 1950s.

So the bi in bisexual was once a count of sexes in a single body, in the science of the 19th century. The people who took the word over gave it a different job. A definition quoted by the Trevor Project, among others, comes from the bi activist and writer Robyn Ochs, who describes bisexuality as the potential to be attracted, romantically and/or sexually, to "people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree."

Pansexual: first a charge against Freud

Pansexualism is recorded from 1917 and pansexual from 1926. At first the words had nothing to do with orientation: they described the view that the sex drive lies behind all human activity. Freud's critics said this was his theory, and the Online Etymology Dictionary notes that the word became a term of reproach aimed at early psychology. The sense of not being limited in sexual choice is recorded by 1972.

The argument that still follows the word is almost as old. Wiktionary quotes a piece from the magazine Ramparts, from the early 1970s, in which the writer calls friends pansexual, "avoiding the older term bisexual, which is meaningless when you can count more than two sexes." The case against bi as a count of two was being made in print more than fifty years ago, long before social media.

Omnisexual: older than it looks

The Online Etymology Dictionary finds omnisexual by 1959, first applied to the poet Walt Whitman, and defines it simply as pansexual: two prefixes that both mean all, and one meaning.

The distinction between them came from the people using the words. Wiktionary records that omnisexual is sometimes set apart from pansexual by saying that omnisexual attraction may still take account of gender, or prefer particular genders. That community sense, gender-aware rather than gender-blind, is the one our glossary uses. It is not the one the Online Etymology Dictionary gives, so do not be surprised if someone looks the word up and finds it defined as pansexual.

Polysexual: a word with other lives

Polysexual has no entry in the Online Etymology Dictionary, and Wiktionary shows why it is hard to pin down. In some psychoanalytic and sexology writing, it described the idea that everyone begins life with an open sexuality. In books about polyamory and swinging from the 2000s and 2010s, it meant having several sexual partners. The sense of many genders but not all is the LGBTQ one, and it sits beside the others rather than replacing them.

That history helps explain why the confusion with polyamory persists. It is not only a misreading by people who half-know the word: for some writers, that really was what it meant.

Each word now has its own flag, and the pansexual, omnisexual and polysexual flag pages explain their colours and where they came from.

Does bisexual leave out non-binary people?

This is the question behind much of the bisexual vs pansexual argument, and the short answer is no. The Bisexual Resource Center defines bisexual as attraction to more than one gender, physical, romantic and/or emotional. Ochs's definition says more than one sex and/or gender. Neither is a count of two.

The accusation that bisexual is binary, or even transphobic, has been answered in detail from inside trans communities. In 2010 the writer Julia Serano, a trans woman who identifies as bisexual, published an essay arguing that bisexuality does not reinforce the gender binary. In a follow-up in 2012, she wrote that the harshest criticism had come from within certain parts of trans and gender-variant communities, and set out her answer.

• The charge is selective. Most gay men and lesbians describe themselves as attracted to the same sex and not the opposite one, which is just as binary, yet the accusation is rarely aimed at them.
• Bi has more than one meaning. Serano pointed out that the prefix can mean two, but also twice, and that nobody who calls themselves bicoastal is denying the land in between.
• Familiar words do work. Bisexual is understood almost everywhere, and the fight against bi erasure was built on it. Dropping it for a word most people have never heard, she argued, would make coming out harder, not easier.

She also wrote that she respected people's right to choose pansexual, omnisexual, polysexual or multisexual instead, and said she used both bisexual and queer herself. Her point was not that one word is right. It was that bisexual people should not have to defend their word against a charge rarely made against anyone else. The glossary entry for bisexual covers the longer history of non-binary people in bi organising.

What research says about who uses which word

Research on these labels is limited, but three findings are worth knowing.

First, the attraction behind the words looks similar. In an online survey of 2,220 non-heterosexual volunteers, published in 2017 by researchers at the University of Sydney, most of the people who called themselves pansexual had attraction scores in the bisexual range. They reported the same patterns of sexual and romantic attraction, behaviour and partner gender as people who called themselves bisexual. The people choosing pansexual were younger, and participants who were not cisgender were more likely to choose it. It was a volunteer sample, not a representative one, so treat it as a strong hint rather than a census.

Second, people move between the words. In a study of 60 bisexual and pansexual people aged 18 to 30, published in the Journal of Bisexuality, the two groups defined bisexuality in similar ways, and participants changed their definitions depending on the social context they were in.

Third, trans people choose differently from the wider population. In Gallup's polling of American adults, bisexual is the most common LGBTQ+ identity by a wide margin, and pansexual is not even one of the listed answers: it only turns up when people volunteer it. In the 2015 US Transgender Survey, which had 27,715 respondents, 18 per cent chose pansexual and 14 per cent bisexual, with queer the most common answer at 21 per cent. Those two surveys asked different people different questions, and the transgender survey was not a random sample, so the figures do not compare directly. The gap is still hard to miss.

Why these words suit trans and non-binary people

Gay, lesbian and straight describe the genders you are drawn to in relation to your own. If your own gender is changing, unsettled or outside the binary, those words can stop fitting, or never fit at all. Bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual and polysexual describe the people you are drawn to without asking you to define yourself first.

A 2024 review of 14 qualitative studies on how trans people understand their sexual orientation, published in the International Journal of Transgender Health, points the same way. People still exploring, and unsure who they were attracted to, tended to choose labels that did not commit them to defining themselves or their partners, such as queer or pan. Trans people with a more binary sense of their gender found the traditional categories, including bi, easier to use. The reviewers also note that shifts in labels usually follow a new understanding of oneself, sometimes about gender first and sometimes about orientation first. Changing words is not proof you were wrong before.

One thing none of the four words does is sort people into trans and cis. Being trans is not a separate gender on the list: a trans woman is on it as a woman, a trans man as a man, and a non-binary person as whatever their gender is. So polysexual is not a polite way of saying not attracted to trans people, and pansexual is not a promise to date them. The words say which genders, not which bodies or histories.

How to choose, and what a profile tells you

If you are trying to decide, it can help to ask the two questions from the start of this guide. Does my attraction reach every gender, or many of them? And when I am drawn to someone, does their gender matter, colour it, or not come into it? If the honest answer is it depends, or I do not know yet, bisexual already covers you, and so does queer.

• Bisexual is understood almost everywhere, including outside LGBTQ+ spaces, and it covers everything the other three do.
• Pansexual says something specific about gender, and it is the word many trans and non-binary people reach for, as the surveys above show. Some people will still assume it means attracted to everyone, which it does not.
• Omnisexual says the most precise thing and is the least known. Expect to explain it, and expect some people to have read the dictionary definition that treats it as pansexual.
• Polysexual is often misread as polyamorous, especially when shortened to poly. Write it in full, and add a few words about what you mean if it matters to you.

Using more than one is common and honest. The Trevor Project notes that some people use bisexual and pansexual interchangeably while others keep to one. Some say bi to their family, pan to their friends and omni on a forum, and the research above suggests they are not being inconsistent, just choosing the word the room will understand. On a dating profile, bi/pan does the job for most readers.

Reading someone else's profile, take the word as a direction rather than a contract. It tells you roughly who they are open to and nothing about their type, their history or what they want from you. If it matters, ask the way you would ask about anything else, once and without making it a test. The same logic applies to the words for women who love women, and WLW, sapphic and transbian sets those side by side.

The words that are left over

Two more words turn up in the same conversations. Multisexual is the umbrella for all of these, used mostly when writing about the whole group rather than about yourself. Queer is broader still, covering anyone who is not straight or not cis, and many bi+ people use it alongside or instead of any of the four.

None of these words is a test that you pass by getting it right. Each one exists because somebody needed to say something the others did not. You can pick one, two or none, and you can change your mind.