Smth I wrote to my campus's LGBT chat who were still dead set on protesting the existence of a nonbinary professor (allyn walker) who advocated for using the term MAP that some of you might find interesting or whatever
Do I blame anyone for really not liking the entire situation? No not really protecting kids is arguably like the basis of politics and victims of sexual abuse are pretty powerless already. Especially as queer people, I think we all feel like maps are being let off the hook to an extent and I share that visceral sense of injustice that I don't get to have the moral high ground over pedophiles. Those hangups about that perceived injustice shouldn't be what inform our politics though.
People all over the world are inventing new flavors of misgendering of course their statement is gonna be rehearsed bc half the people up in arms think they're like an actual pedophile and like I think map is a shitty concept like it doesn't really touch power relations at all. It's a bad book and a deeply flawed methodology but people aren't exactly debating scientific philosophy here.
I've been on the receiving end of a "this Troon is pro rape" campaign and it's really not the vibe. Like you say something as benign as "the way cis lesbians treat trans women with abject disgust is bad probably" and you've got random women twice your age talking about how disappointed my father must be and that you're mansplaining consent. I was 15. Nothing short of public castration is going to be the "correct" and I can safely say dr walker's life is going to be ruined by this. The harassment will not stop. No kids were helped.
As for the LGBT comparison, I think it's a glaring sign that grounding gayness psychiatrically hasn't worked in the past and clearly doesn't encapsulate heteropatriarchy. Like when it was a mental illness, the dsm didn't say anything about gender as a setup that presupposes heterosexuality, how fluid and complicated gayness is, how it changes your relation to your understanding of gender. Psychiatry can't describe power imbalances- like is your ptsd still ptsd when you're actively worrying about the real possibility of a drone attack? The MAP category is bound to be unsatisfactory but that's the entire field. The coming out comparison is benign once you say yeah acting on gayness is cool acting on pedophilia is not, but they're both stigmatized preferences that psychology is using the same tools to grapple with. I think if what walker wrote still enrages you, then I think you might really be mad at psychiatry, the social category of crime, the family unit, and the entire carceral apparatus they're clumsily navigating.
(I'm borrowing heavily from foucault, fanon, and the crimethinc article "against the logic of the guillotine")