I've actually met Lani Ka'ahumanu, and the idea that she would be against calling yourself pan is hilarious.
Y'all. The bi movement was started by hippies. LITERALLY NONE of your ~bisexual elders~ give a fuck what any of you call yourselves. Not a single one.
The very strongest negative opinion I've ever seen from 70s-80s bi activists on "just calling yourself bi," was a piece in an '80s bi newsletter that kind of grumbled about how a ton of people don't use ANY label, because calling yourself bi comes with so much stigma.
That's it. That's actually the only one.
In fact, the reason that I've met Lani in person is that she lives in a part of Northern California that's at Big Fire Risk, so she stores her boxes of bi archival materials somewhere safer during fire season each year. And somehow I get to keep them for her this year, AND LOOK through them!
Which I started doing today.
Turns out that the Wellington, New Zealand Bi Women's Group - which still exists! - organized the first National NZ Bisexual Conference in 1990. And wrote up this report about it afterward.
At the "What Does Bisexuality Mean To Me?" workshop, "many agreed that finding the right words and language to describe ourselves could be a positive experience."
(Or, of course, today, it could be a horrible experience where people in your own community feel free to shit on you for using words they don't like.)
"Words like gynandrous, gender-bender, polymorphously perverse, and pansexual were suggested as possible alternatives to bisexual."
Emphasis mine. Please note that they were suggesting these as alternative words people might personally use, not proposing One New Term To Rule Them All.
Also note that these terms were very heavily about gender, and probably reflected the fact that the bi community has always included a LOT of nonbinary people.
(And if you look at large-scale studies now that separate bi and pan people out, the pan people are almost all under the trans umbrella.)
Likewise, at the "Bisexual Politics" workshop, the notes afterward repeatedly emphasized "wanting to ensure the bisexual community stays non-exclusive."
This bullshit tug-of-war over terms is a huge departure from bi culture, bi politics, and bi history, and it needs to stop.
The entire concept that SOME people don't get shat upon enough by our oppressors, and we need to make them feel as excluded and alienated as possible because they're BAD and/or DON'T BELONG, needs to GO.
But the anti-pan stuff is especially ridiculous, and that's saying something. It's not even "oh, you're making us look foolish in front of our oppressors," "you're not really queer," or "the labels and/or pronouns you use harm others in some unprovable way!" It's "I decided that everyone who uses this label does it because they think bad things about trans and/or bi people!"
Just purely making things up, making up rationalizations for them, and then saying all of them loud and long enough that a bunch of people join in.