Debate Guide: MAPs are invalid
- "No attraction to minors is a valid sexuality, whatever label you put on it. Your age is not your sex! Child and Teenager are not genders, invalid!"
This "identitarian" argument is often made (but not exclusively so) by LGBT people who like to claim that MAPs can not be gay, homosexual or queer under any circumstances, and should voluntarily distance themselves from the LGBT Movement. They argue this, seemingly ignorant of how common the attractions are, and how they must by necessity coexist with the gender-based attractions unaccounted for. Sexuality experts, and the bible of Psychiatry, the DSM appear to endorse the idea of attractions to particular groups of minors as a sexual orientation.
The first thing that should be pointed out, is that nobody actually uses the term "MAP" to denote a sexuality. It is in fact an identity; an umbrella term used to unify people with differing attractions, who have been put in the same boat as a result of political/cultural circumstances. Pedophilia and Hebephilia are examples of sexual "orientations" that fall under this umbrella term. The historical reasons for the MAP identity are in fact the ostracism and distancing of MAPs from a formerly accepting LGBT Movement.
Contradictions of the identitarian argument
The second point here, is that if boylovers are not homosexual because sexuality is exclusive to gender (as anti-MAPs like to claim), heterosexual pedophiles and hebephiles can not be deemed "straight", either. We would then have to ask, what exactly is this well-documented tendency of pedophiles and hebephiles to gravitate towards one or the other gender, if it is not a gender preference? It appears that the insistence upon a complete divorce here, is entirely political. Not only that, but it covertly legitimizes the concept of chronophilia as a secondary spectrum of desires and identities, since age-structured relations have been present throughout the entirety of human history, and have now (they would maintain) been excluded from the category "sexualities", despite being of great operative importance to what is considered a sexuality.
Taking the above argument in another direction, it is held that if pedophiles or hebephiles of any gender preference aren't also into adults, they can't be considered gay (or indeed straight). So what if they have a non-preferential attraction to adults? Can they now ascend to the status of fully fledged queer, homosexual, or indeed heterosexual? What about a 13 year old boy who is attracted to other 13 year old boys? We'd have to maintain that because his psychological target is not an adult, he can not be considered "gay", does not "know himself", and should remain open-minded to the idea that he may in fact be pederastically inclined. After all, there is no solid evidence that these attractions will change as he ages, unless they are based on mere social norms. If essentialist gay identitarians were to stay true to these principles, they would have to give up their pursuit of LGBT youth organizations and policies, for example.