Not that I think they should be included in LGBTQ+ but as someone who is bisexual I feel they’re not as far from us as you seemingly believe. Why wouldn’t we compare them? Both are sexual attractions that deviate from the norm. A pedophile didn’t choose to be a pedophile anymore than I chose to be bi.
Growing up in a conservative household and town was a miserable experience for me. I hated myself, didn’t want to accept it, and felt utterly alone. Now think about how much worse it must be to realize you’re attracted to children. You have zero allies, you have zero people you can talk to, and a lot of people hate you merely for existing and/or want you dead. From where I stand their experience echoes my experience being LBGTQ+ quite heavily. Except over my lifetime LBGTQ+ acceptance grew quite rapidly and my husband was the light at the end of the tunnel. But pedophiles will never get that, probably ever. I feel nothing but sympathy for their situation.
And what “serious psychiatric care” do you even think there is for it? Unless you also believe in gay conversion camps, we have nothing. We don’t even really know how sexuality actually works in the brain, we definitely aren’t anywhere close to being able to treat it.
Why wouldn’t we compare them?
Really? What part of your sexuality, or mine, involves raping children? Nothing, right? One step back, what part of you being bisexual or my being trans involves harming anyone? That’s right, nothing.
I don’t have the answer of how to deal with those that are attracted to children. But to suggest psychiatric care for those who have serious pathology is akin to gay conversion camps is gross.
This is not some philosophical debate. Stop playing into the hands of bigots who are actively trying to paint LGBTQ+ folks, especially trans people at the moment, as “groomers” and “pedos”.
We are not associated or comparable with pedophiles in any way, shape or form—full stop.
Tf are you talking about, unless being gay involves raping men, being pedo also doesn’t involve raping children. Even as a cishet non-pedo you will often encounter situations where acting on some attraction you feel would be anywhere from morally questionable to straight up illegal, and most of us manage to deal with that just fine. Of course that’s going to be tougher for someone whose entire experience consists of that, rather than just part of it, but nothing about being pedo forces you to become a child-raping piece of shit.
Of course psychiatric care is important, but the point the other commenter was making is that it’s currently impossible to change anyone’s attraction, so it’s not a pathology that can be “cured” in this way. Any psychiatric care currently has to be aimed at helping people deal with being pedo without acting on it and also not developing any other psychological afflictions because of suppressing their attraction. Trying to “cure” the attraction itself would indeed be akin to gay conversion therapy: there’s no scientific evidence it works, and it’s going to do more harm than good.
