Multisexual / M-spec

Multisexual is an umbrella term for any sexual or romantic orientation that involves attraction to more than one gender. M-spec is short for multisexual spectrum and means the same thing. Neither is usually a label people carry on its own. They are collective terms for a group of orientations that includes bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, polysexual and spectrasexual, and they exist so the group can be named without picking one member to stand in for all of them.

The umbrella is useful because these labels overlap heavily and because people move between them. The same person can use bisexual in one room, pansexual in another and queer in a third, and be telling the truth every time. Research on plurisexual labels finds they mark different aspects of one experience rather than divide it into compartments: bisexual carries the history and the political weight, pansexual foregrounds attraction that does not sort by gender, queer refuses sorting altogether, and fluid emphasises change over time.

The five labels in this guide

• Bisexual. Attraction to more than one gender, not necessarily equally, at once, or in the same way. The oldest of the five and by far the most used. It sets a floor of more than one and names no ceiling, which is why so many people fit inside it.
• Pansexual. Attraction regardless of gender. The emphasis is that gender is not a factor in who someone finds attractive.
• Omnisexual. Attraction to all genders, with gender still felt as part of the attraction. The mirror image of pansexual: everyone is in range, and gender is noticed rather than set aside.
• Polysexual. Attraction to many genders but not necessarily all of them. The emphasis is a range that has edges.
• Spectrasexual. Attraction across a spectrum of genders and sexes, explicitly including intersex and non-binary people. The emphasis is breadth described as a spectrum rather than as a count.

The differences there are mostly differences of emphasis. That is not a flaw in the vocabulary. It is what happens when a lot of people try to describe something precisely, and it is why nobody should be told which of these words is theirs.

Multisexual is Latin multi- (many) plus sexual. M-spec is a community contraction of multisexual spectrum. Plurisexual and non-monosexual describe the same group, and bi+ is the term many bisexual organisations use for it. All of these came out of bi+ community and online spaces, and none has a coinage we can trace to a person or a date. We would rather say that than pick one and repeat it.

• Bisexual is much the oldest of the five. It entered English in the 1800s meaning having both sexes in one body, had shifted to describing attraction to more than one gender by the early twentieth century, and was not in general use until the 1950s.
• Organised bisexual community dates from the 1970s. Brenda Howard, a bisexual activist, helped organise the first Pride march in 1970, and the San Francisco Bisexual Center opened in 1976.
• 1990: the Bay Area Bisexual Network published the Bisexual Manifesto in the first issue of Anything That Moves. It told readers not to assume that bisexuality is binary or duogamous in nature, and not to assume that there are only two genders. Bisexual people were arguing against the two-genders-only reading of their own word more than thirty years ago.
• The other four are later, and mostly online. Pansexual circulated in queer and kink spaces from the 1970s onward and reached a wide audience through Tumblr around 2010. Omnisexual took its current shape online across the 2000s and 2010s. The polysexual flag was posted by Tumblr user Samlin in 2012. Spectrasexual appeared on Tumblr in the mid 2010s and no coining post has been reliably identified.
• That timing is why much of the friction here is generational rather than definitional. People who spent decades fighting to have bisexual recognised, insisting the whole time that it never meant two, can hear pansexual defined against a version of bisexual they never held. People who met pansexual first can hear bisexual as the narrow word they were told it was. Neither is describing the other accurately. The disagreement is unresolved, and this guide does not take a side in it.

• "Multisexual or m-spec is a new identity." It is not an identity. It is a collective noun for a group of them, and it is not meant to replace the words underneath it.
• "Bisexual means two genders, so a new umbrella was needed." Bisexual people and bisexual organisations have defined it as attraction to more than one gender for decades. The Bisexual Resource Center's definition is exactly that.
• "These are all the same thing with extra steps." They overlap, and they are not identical. Each foregrounds something different about how gender figures in attraction, and that difference matters to the people using it.
• "You have to pick one and stick with it." Plenty of people use two or more, in different contexts or at different times. Changing your label does not mean the old one was a mistake.
• See the full comparison: Bisexual vs Pansexual.

We do not list notable people on this page. Multisexual and m-spec are collective terms rather than words people claim for themselves, so anyone listed here would in practice be someone who uses bisexual, pansexual or another specific label. Those names belong on the individual entries.