James Cantor, paedophilia and the “Gender Critical” movement

Content warning: This post will be discussing individuals and organisations that seek to normalise paedophilia. While child sexual abuse…

Sarah Clarke

14 Dec 2021 — 2 min read

Content warning: This post will be discussing individuals and organisations that seek to normalise paedophilia. While child sexual abuse will not be directly discussed, archive links to these organisation’s public websites are included for evidence of claims made.

Doctor James Cantor is a sexologist whose career began at Toronto’s infamous CAMH service under Ray Blanchard. Unsurprisingly, given this background, Cantor is a prominent defender of Blanchard’s transmisogynistic and widely discredited typology of transsexuals, which seeks to place all trans women into one of two categories based on our sexuality, both of which are predicated on the assumption that our motivations for transition are always primarily sexual.

Cantor has also seen a great deal of favour within the anti-trans “gender critical”(GC) movement for his writing on “desistance”, becoming the primary source for the widely stated, if empirically poorly supported, stat that 60–90% of trans children grow up to be cis. This statistic is based on Cantor’s reading of 11 papers, published between 1972 and 2013. Of these papers, most were not about transgender children at all and seven were published in the 70s and 80s. For a thorough debunking of Cantor’s article, I highly recommend Science Vs Propaganda’s YouTube video, Do most trans teens change their mind? | Following JK Rowling down the fake science rabbit hole, but briefly, a majority of the literature cited by Cantor are in fact conversion therapy papers, seeking to justify psychological and institutional abuse to make LGBTQ+ kids cis and heterosexual.

What is perhaps less well known about Cantor (though becoming increasingly difficult to ignore), is his advocacy for paedophiles. Cantor has explicitly called for the inclusion of paedophiles within the LGBTQ+ movement and has previously claimed that “Pedophilia is NOT inherently wrong or harmful”. Cantor also until recently served as an advisor for Prostasia.

Prostasia are a US based non-profit organisation that claim to be primarily concerned with “child protection”. However, a considerable amount of the content produced on their website focuses on reducing the “stigma” associated with being a paedophile, other campaigns by Prostasia include fighting against the criminalisation of sex dolls modelled after children. Prostasia has previously run a “MAP support club” (Minor Attracted Person or MAP is a euphemism used by online paedophile communities), an online space for paedophiles which included people from ages 13 and up.

In summary, Cantor is part of a movement that seeks to destigmatise and depathologise paedophilia, encouraging adults with urges to sexually abuse children to see this as a harmless sexual orientation and creating “support” forums which put such people in contact with each other and potentially vulnerable young people.

Despite this, Cantor’s work on desistance has been widely cited by the GC movement, including by prominant GC groups and individuals. A list of the organisations and archive links for their citations or support of Cantor is included below. While it is difficult to be certain of the extent to which these organisations are aware of Cantor’s other advocacy activities, some within the GC movement are most certainly aware of this and have raised this as an issue. It is extremely concerning that organisations seeking to influence policy on child safeguarding and healthcare appear to regard James Cantor as a credible source.

4th Wave Now:

Transgender Trend:

Genspect:

Society For Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM):