a lot of the first wave of queer theorists (thinking here folks like Califia, Rubin) fell into a mistake where they looked at the ways that Stranger Danger and other forms of "protecting the child" from the shadowy figure of the pedophile, noticed that this was leveraged against gay people specifically, and then chose as a reaction to consider "boy love" (as it was usually called then) a sort of oppressed sexuality. I believe at this point, none of the currently living theorists who argued this still hold it, from what I understand.
So, what does that sort of lens miss? Some provisional thoughts:
The simple abolition of taboos across the board really has no liberatory meaning. A society with no adult-child sexuality taboo isn't inherently more liberated than the alternative - just look at Ancient Rome. Of course, many of those early gay people were actually very nostalgic for the non-Christian, more idiosyncratically open to homoeroticism mores of the Greco-Roman world. Regardless, as we can see, adult-child sexuality frequently fits into larger heirarchical models of social organization. One simply has to make the actual argument for why something is good - beyond simply that it rejects a current repression
Is the "Pedophile" socially sanctioned, marginalized, punished? Certainly, just as much as the "Rapist" as a category of person is socially sanctioned. Does that mean that child sexual abuse is? That seems to be much less the case. Child sexual abuse, like other forms of sexual coercion or exploitation, seems common enough to say that it is not fully condemned by society in some sense. Especially taking into consideration the likelihood of allegations of this really only sticking to or affecting disempowered people (see by contrast: the President).
Countenancing the psychiatrically constructed category of the "pedophile" and then arguing for its liberation reifies the modernist categorization method. A comparator might be less something like gay people or trans people, but if the DSM-6 had a paraphilic category called the "rapeophile" - someone who had an inborn sexual identity that meant they could only be attracted to people and have sex with unconsenting sex partners. Even if those put in the Rapeophile subgrouping were truly oppressed (say, diagnosis results in death sentences, no matter one's conduct), this wouldn't have anything to say about the underlying acts themselves. It would merely be an argument against the naturalization categories. It wouldn't really follow that we need to 'destigmatize rape'.
In any case, I think that this is one of the many traps of naturalized sexual identifications - if they were true, it might follow that there's really nothing morally actionable about someone's inborn disposition. But luckily, there's all sorts of queer and trans perspectives that reject this sort of re-affirmation of modern sexological and categorical systems.
