

This meant that those who engaged in these terms were represented as educated and enlightened. In the second theme entitled Educated and enlightened pansexuals we report how participants portrayed pansexual and panromantic identities as requiring an advanced understanding of gender and sexuality. In The label depends on the context: It’s like bisexuality, but it isn’t, we report the blurred lines between pansexual and bisexual identities and discuss how, despite often having a preference for pansexual and panromantic, these participants nonetheless engaged in strategic use of both bi and pan terms.

Thematic analysis resulted in the development of two key themes. Eighty participants, mainly in the U.K., were recruited via social media and internet forums. In this paper, we report on our survey research which sought to explore how pansexual and panromantic people experience and understand their identities.
