Omnisexuality

Omnisexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by attraction to people of all genders, in which gender is not incidental but is understood to be part of what shapes the attraction. The Trevor Project defines the term as describing someone "attracted to people of all genders, and for whom gender plays an important part of attraction" (The Trevor Project). The Human Rights Campaign's parallel definition of pansexuality — "the potential for emotional, romantic or sexual attraction to people of any gender though not necessarily simultaneously, in the same way or to the same degree" (Human Rights Campaign) — illustrates the usage distinction major institutions draw between the two neighboring terms: pansexuality is commonly framed as attraction that does not depend on gender, while omnisexuality is framed as attraction in which gender remains a live, registered factor.

Wikipedia's overview of pansexuality states the same distinction in its own words: "when a distinction is made" between the two, pansexuality "emphasizes gender blindness, while" omnisexuality "emphasizes the role of gender in attraction" (Wikipedia — Pansexuality). In practice this means an omnisexual person may consciously notice gender, may be drawn differently to different genders, or may experience attraction to one gender as qualitatively different from attraction to another — without any gender being excluded from the range of people they can be attracted to. The two words nonetheless sit close enough in meaning that Wikipedia's own entry on omnisexuality notes some people "use it as a synonym for pansexuality" while others "see the two identities as distinct" (Wikipedia — Omnisexuality); usage is not fully standardized across sources.

Like pansexuality and polysexuality, omnisexuality sits within the broader bisexual+ ("bi+") or multisexual umbrella — orientations describing attraction to more than one gender. The Trevor Project situates the term within this wider category of multisexuality, alongside bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, and fluid identities (The Trevor Project).

History

Word for word, "omnisexual" pairs the Latin prefix omni- ("all") with sexuality, the same construction pansexual makes from the Greek pan- ("all"). The word is not a recent coinage: Wikipedia's entry on pansexuality traces one of its earliest documented uses to an 1878 Portuguese-language book review by the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, who described a novel's eroticism as something "Proudhon would call omnisexual and omnimod" — a literary-critical usage, not yet a term of sexual identity (Wikipedia — Pansexuality). Its sibling term followed a similar path decades later: "pansexual" and "pansexualism" were first documented in 1914, coined by critics of Sigmund Freud to describe his theory that the sex instinct "plays the primary part in all human activity" (Wikipedia — Pansexuality).

As a label for sexual orientation, omnisexual circulated within online LGBTQ+ communities from the 2000s onward, as people reached for multisexual words more specific than the older catch-all bisexual. An early instance of the word reaching mainstream media coverage came through GLAAD's "Where We Are on TV" report for the 2010–2011 season, which noted that the animated character Roger on American Dad! most commonly refers to his sexuality as omnisexual (Wikipedia — Omnisexuality). In 2014, the American Institute of Bisexuality took a position on how the newer label relates to the older one, stating that words like pansexual, polysexual, and omnisexual "describe a person with homosexual and heterosexual attractions, and therefore people with these labels are also bisexual" — a claim some people who use the newer labels dispute (Wikipedia — Omnisexuality). The omnisexual pride flag followed several years later: five horizontal stripes of light pink, pink, dark purple, blue, and light blue, designed by a Tumblr user known as Pastelmemer and first published on July 4, 2015 (Wikipedia — Omnisexuality).

Demographics & research

No major national survey by Gallup, Pew Research, or the Williams Institute currently breaks "omnisexual" out as its own response category; where the identity is measured at all, it is typically folded into a combined "pansexual/omnisexual" option. In Ipsos's 2021 LGBT+ Pride Global Survey of more than 19,000 adults across 27 countries, an average of 1% of respondents identified as pansexual or omnisexual, compared with 4% bisexual, 3% gay, lesbian, or homosexual, and 1% asexual; the United States was the only surveyed country where the combined pansexual/omnisexual figure reached as high as 2% (Ipsos). Within the much smaller subgroup of respondents who described their gender as something other than exclusively male or female, 17% identified their sexual orientation as pansexual or omnisexual, the single largest orientation response in that subgroup after lesbian/gay/homosexual and straight (Ipsos).

Terminology & related identities

Omnisexuality, pansexuality, and polysexuality all describe attraction spanning more than one gender, and speakers draw the boundaries between the labels differently; as with bisexuality and pansexuality, many people treat the terms as effectively interchangeable and let self-identification decide which label fits best (Wikipedia — Pansexuality). Where a distinction is drawn, polysexual is typically defined as attraction to multiple, but not necessarily all, genders, setting it apart from omnisexuality's "all genders" scope (Wikipedia — Omnisexuality). The American Institute of Bisexuality's 2014 position — that omnisexual, pansexual, and polysexual people are, by its own definition, also bisexual — represents one institutional view of how these newer labels relate to the older umbrella term, though it is not a consensus reading; the term is more commonly listed, without being collapsed into another label, as one of several words some people use for attraction to more than one gender under the bi+ umbrella (Wikipedia — Omnisexuality). The romantic-orientation counterpart, omniromantic, draws the same distinction from panromantic that omnisexual draws from pansexual: romantic rather than sexual attraction to all genders, with gender registering as a factor in that attraction.