LGBT Glossary

Omnisexual

Omnisexual people like all genders and sexes.
Brighton Pride Party – No tittle, by Dominic Alves utilizada con CC BY 2.0 / redimensionada y optimizada.

It is a category that belongs to sexual orientation. An omnisexual person is one who feels an erotic-affective inclination for people of any gender or sex, being this gender or sex, determinant in the attraction.

The difference between omnisexuality and pansexuality lies in the fact that a pansexual person does not take gender or sex into account when attracted to someone, focusing on other characteristics, whatever these may be. To give an example, pansexual people can feel attracted to a smell, a voice, humor, strength …anything. For them, sex and gender are secondary aspects. Omnisexuals and pansexuals are differentiated by the role played by gender and sex in the attraction.

Similarly, omnisexuality and polysexuality are distinguished by a quantitative issue. A polysexual person may have no interest in any particular gender and/or sex (or some) but may have in the rest of them. For example, a polysexual man may be attracted to cisgender women, transgender women, transsexual women, and demigender women, but not to men or to the “masculine”, whereas an omnisexual person may be attracted to any type of person, being its gender and sex determinant in the attraction, and this omnisexual person likes each and every one of them. A polysexual person likes more than 2 genders and/or sexes, but not all of them.

It is small nuances (but big at the same time) that differentiate these terms, which do nothing but describe what these people feel. In addition, it is necessary to make clear that being omnisexual, pansexual and polysexual does not obviously mean that you are interested in threesomes, orgies, etc., or that you are not monogamous, or that you are attracted to the whole world, at any time. We are talking about what attracts them, not about what they do.

Final English translation by Ruth Carballo Gallego.