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🤔 Bisexual vs. Almondsexual 🤔

🤔 Bisexual vs. Almondsexual 🤔

what's the difference? is there even one?

K Anderson
July 31, 2026

QUEER WORD
BISEXUAL VS. ALMONDSEXUAL

What It Means:

Bisexual:

A person who experiences romantic or sexual attraction to more than one gender. That attraction doesn't have to be equal or occur in the same way towards every gender.

Almondsexual:

A microlabel describing someone who is primarily attracted to men or masculine people, but who also experiences occasional attraction to women or feminine people.

Let’s Use It In A Sentence:

It took Jamie's dad three and a half years to get used to him being bisexual. Jamie decided he'd give it another year before mentioning he now identified as almondsexual.

So... why not just say bisexual?

Ok, ok. So, I know what you're thinking. If someone is attracted to men and masculinity for most of the time, but occasionally experiences attraction to femininity, doesn't that just make them… bisexual? Or pansexual?

And, well… yes. You might have a point.

But let's remember that language evolves to help people better describe their experiences. New words don't just crop up out of nowhere. They're usually coined because someone, somewhere, felt the existing ones weren't quite working.

So, rather than being cynical old grumps about it, why don't we consider some of the reasons someone might describe themselves as almondsexual instead?

1. Because Bisexuality Gets Policed

Let's be honest, bisexual people get a bit of a hard time, often finding themselves under scrutiny from both straight and queer communities. They're told they're ‘secretly gay’, ‘actually straight’, or ‘just confused’. So, if your attraction is predominantly towards one gender, it can start to feel as though you're not ‘bisexual enough’ to use the word at all.

Labels like almondsexual could be a response to that. They provide a way of communicating attraction across multiple genders without inviting quite the same snippy comments over whether you're ‘really’ bisexual.

2. Because Labels Help Us Understand Ourselves

We often think of labels as something we use to explain ourselves to other people.

But they're not just for everyone else.

They're for us, too.

Discovering there's a word for an experience can help make sense of feelings you've struggled to put into words. It can also be reassuring to know you're not the only person who experiences attraction in that way.

3. Because Humans Love Specificity

We seem to have this penchant for making ever finer distinctions. We don't just settle for broad categories; we invent words for all the little variations in between. A colour can’t just be ‘blue’; it has to be turquoise, navy, teal or azure. A gay man can’t just be a ‘bear’; he might instead be an otter, a cub, a wolf or a polar bear.

Once you accept that, it’s really not much of a surprise that sexuality works in much the same way.

the almondsexual flag

So, back to our original question: what is the difference?

I think, ultimately, it comes down to precision.

Bisexual tells you someone is attracted to more than one gender. Almondsexual tells you a little more about what that attraction looks like.

And yeah, you could argue over whether that's a distinction worth making. But it's clearly important enough to enough people that someone felt the existing words weren't quite doing the job.

You don't have to use every new word you come across. But understanding why it exists is never a bad place to start.