[1][2] Pansexual people may refer to themselves as gender-blind, asserting that gender and sex are not determining factors in their romantic or sexual attraction to others.

[13] Machado de Assis classified the naturalism and lack of sexual filter present in the novel as “reminiscences and allusions of an eroticism that Proudhon would call omnisexual and omnimod”.

[14][15] Early individuals who displayed pansexual tendencies include John Wilmot[16] and Friedrich Schiller.

[17] Although later attributed to Shulamith Firestone,[18] the hybrid words "pansexual" and "pansexualism" were first attested in 1914 (spelled "pan-sexualism"), coined by opponents of Sigmund Freud[19] to denote the idea "that the sex instinct plays the primary part in all human activity, mental and physical".

[20][a] The term was translated to German as Pansexualismus in Freud's work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.

[22] The word "pansexual" is attested as a term for a variety of attraction, alongside "omnisexual" (coming from the Latin omnis, "all") and the earlier "bisexual", by the 1970s.

Using these definitions, pansexuality is defined differently by explicitly including people who are intersex or outside the gender binary.

[2][10] Volume 2 of Cavendish's Sex and Society states that "although the term's literal meaning can be interpreted as "attracted to everything", people who identify as pansexual do not usually include paraphilias, such as bestiality, pedophilia and necrophilia, in their definition", and that they "stress that the term 'pansexuality' describes only consensual adult sexual behaviors.

"[2] The definition of pansexuality can encourage the belief that it is the only sexual identity that covers individuals who do not cleanly fit into the categories of male or man, or female or woman.

"[33] The institute believes that the idea that identifying as bisexual reinforces a false gender binary "has its roots in the anti-science, anti-Enlightenment philosophy that has ironically found a home within many Queer Studies departments at universities across the Anglophone world", and that, "while it is true that our society's language and terminology do not necessarily reflect the full spectrum of human gender diversity, that is hardly the fault of people who choose to identify as bi.

Green notes that this does not account for the large percentage of transgender and nonbinary individuals who also identify as bisexual, and characterizes these participants as contributing to a long history of biphobia.

While some participants spoke favorably of bisexuality, describing the recognition of the validity of pansexuality as being contingent on the recognition of the validity of bisexuality, Green concludes by saying "In borrowing narratives that they are familiar with, the pansexual individuals interviewed in this study reinforced an essentialist understanding of identity despite their attempts to deconstruct gender binaries".

"[33] Eisner states that "the idea of bisexuality as an umbrella term can emphasize a multiplicity of identities, forms of desire, lived experiences, and politics," and "resist a single standard" of defining bisexual-umbrella identities and communities, including pansexuality and pansexuals.

[46] In 2017, 14% of a sample of 12,000 LGBTQ youth between 13 and 17 years of age declared themselves pansexual in a Human Rights Campaign/University of Connecticut survey.

[50] The 2021 IPSOS survey found that the United States was the country with the highest percentage of pansexual individuals.