VirPed Panel: 19 August 2024

“Pevensie” asks:

Is there a particular kind of person who deals with it well if you come out them? Are people from minorities better because they know what it’s like to experience prejudice? Are religious people more forgiving? Do smart people deal with it better than not-so-smart people?

It runs the gammut. I’ve had a number of different people accept my from various backgrounds. The only ones who were outright hostile were a gay couple I was friends with. I think people who are radically progressive or really into kink, but also thoughtful and intelligent, are possibly the best types to come out to.

Deeply empathetic people that have also been very much on the outside within some social contexts, I feel, are a good fit.

I rationally say this, but for me, it’s only ever really worked if I listened to the little man inside me that tells me it’s ok to tell the person. It’s not really a rational thing. It’s intuition. Sometimes, you want or need to tell the person, and you ignore the voice that tells you it’s not a a good idea. This, in my experience, has always been a bad move.

I’ve never come out to anyone face-to-face, but it’s been my experience that anyone is capable of prejudice, even those from within minorities. I used to imagine that they might have more sympathy, having experienced prejudice themselves, but this is not always the case. People are people, after all. Haters are always going to hate, I guess. This is true with ‘smart’ people too, I’ve noticed. Just because they might be quite intelligent, compared to others, doesn’t mean they are necessarily more enlightened.

I’ve never came out to anyone and God-willing, never will. I would like to think some people I know would accepting of it but hard to say…

Have I ever come out to anyone voluntarily? No. No one. I think it’s safe to say that those most likely to handle it well are immediate family because they know best one’s essence. And that is only if their experience doesn’t include some event that makes it particularly difficult for them to accept. But even then, they may feel the need to confide in another for support. And maybe that person tells someone else. And before one knows it, it’s all over.

My brother knew my attractions for years without mentioning it to me. He had been at my place alone and had looked at compilations of movie clips that revealed a certain pattern. But he didn’t think it was a big deal.

If people are determined to come out, they would usually choose someone they thought was open minded. But I’ve never considered the risk worth it. So, I’ve made loads of online friends among fellow MAPs and met them in real life. I need to be able to be honest, at least most of the time.

Younger people seem to react better. Probably because hate, stigma, and stereotypes are learned and reinforced over time.

I started coming out to people when I was a teenager, mostly to peers at first, then a younger sibling and my parents.

My sibling was by far the most accepting, drawing parallels with other sexual minorities that they knew more about to better conceptualize what I was going through and my experiences with stigma.

Peers were a close second, perhaps not trying quite as hard to understand my experience, but still avoiding jumping to illogical conclusions based solely on my attractions. The one partly negative reaction I had from a peer came from someone who is more religious and more conservative than most of my other friends. I don’t know enough about her thought process to say whether either played a role in her reaction, but those two traits stand out when comparing her to people who had more positive reactions.

My parents, while still supportive, had a lot more trouble with it. My mom, in particular, pushed pretty hard for me to go back to therapy (I’d been out to my previous therapist and didn’t find it helpful, plus peer support had already allowed me to work through most of the stuff that therapy can help with in the first place). She also didn’t like when I used the word “pedophile” to describe myself, likely because she’s been exposed to misinformation about its meaning for decades longer than my friends and sibling.

I think what separates the safe people from the unsafe people is how “gentle” they are as people, and how resilient they are too. When I say “gentle”, I actually mean “considerate”, because people who are considerate tend to give thought to things like paedophilia, and treat the topic gently. So, if they’re gentle and thoughtful with other serious things, they’ll probably be good to come out to. I’ve come out successfully to people who are unbothered, and people who are very bothered, but the one thing they had in common was that soft touch with serious topics.

Honestly, I’ve found that being queer has little bearing on how well a person takes it when you come out to them, as much as I feel a connection to queer people. Some queer people don’t have time to spare the thought, and, to be fair, I don’t blame them. It doesn’t feel good to say “bigots gonna bigot”, but c’est la vie.

When it comes to pedophilia it really depends on the person themselves. I’ve seen hateful and accepting people from young to old and across all sides of the political spectrum. I think it comes down to how empathetic and nuanced the individual in question is. The only people I’ve come out to before are family and a therapist I’d done some research on beforehand and all of them are exceptionally empathetic and reason capable people.

I’ve had two periods in my life when I came out to people. One was in my early twenties, when I just needed to tell someone, and wasn’t really thinking carefully about who. That included mainly young straight men and women. The straight man reacted poorly and couldn’t deal with it. The women dealt with it quite maturely, but not acceptingly and with little ability to support me in the way I needed. I learned from this and stopped coming out. These just didn’t have the life experience or information or specialist knowledge to put what I was saying in context. All they knew about pedophiles was from news stories.

When I started coming out again it was pretty much entirely to carefully selected gay men, older than 30, and generally I’ve had much calmer and proportionate reactions from them. I think there’s more awareness among that group that (a) men’s ages of attraction can be tilted toward youth (which is very frankly acknowledged in gay culture), so asymmetry of age attraction is not a new concept to them and (b) their life experience will include having false assumptions made about them based on their same sex attraction.

I haven’t put this to the test much, but I also get the impression that professionals who work frontline in health or social work have probably seen enough to react proportionately to this, too. I did come out to a medical professional once, at a time of distress, and while I got a lot of rather challenging questioning about my behaviour, she did listen carefully and didn’t (as far as I know) overreact.

But I really don’t think there’s any hard and fast rule, or an easy way to predict who will take it well. People bring their own (sometimes hidden) histories to this conversation, for example experiences of being sexually abused as a child. It takes a lot of maturity, calmness and independence of thought to put aside what you think you know about pedophilia, even when that’s based on personal experience, and to listen instead to a pedophile as a unique individual.

If you’re reading this and you’re not a pedophile yourself, I guess that must apply to you too, so thank you.

Generally, when I choose to come out, I’m looking for people who seem to have those things, and avoiding people who I fear might become emotional or make it more about themselves.

I have very little experience in coming out to people, so I can’t say for sure if this is true. It would make logical sense that other minorities, especially sexual minorities, would be more accepting of us compared to others. But I have not tested this myself, and I don’t have any plans to. The only time I ever came out to anyone was my mum, several years ago when I was sixteen, and while she was initially accepting, in the long term she grew worried about me being a potential threat to children (especially when I started working with children) and I eventually had to redact my coming out to the best of my ability. What I’ve learned is that even the most open-minded people can break down at such a stigmatized topic.

One group who probably do accept us more than anyone else are other stigmatized sexualities, such as zoophiles or necrophiles. Unlike LGBT groups, these people are not mainstream and still considered outcasts by many, so there’s that mutual level of understanding. I’m not convinced the same can be said of more widely accepted LGBT groups, many of them will loudly reject us. And honestly I don’t blame them: gay and trans people have to deal with bigots accusing them of grooming children etc, so it’s no surprise that they try to fight any pedophile association. It’s disappointing, and I would like to see LGBT groups say “Pedophilia is also a sexualiy, the only difference between us and them is that they can’t ethically act on their sexuality with the people who they’re attracted to” but in the current climate I understand why they don’t. It’s a catch-22: to erase the stigma, we need pedophiles and allies speaking up, but people don’t want to because of the stigma.

I’ve no experience with therapists, but one would like to think that a trained therapist would be more understanding than the average person. Pedophiles’ experiences with therapists have been mixed: some have been understanding, others have not. Someone’s personal history also needs to be considered: if they were abused as a child, it’s understandable that they’ll have more of a negative reaction. But overall there’s no set in stone pattern, and given that I’m on the spectrum and my past coming out experience, I don’t trust my ability to gauge how people will react.

It’s hard to tell to be honest. We all seemed to have had varying experiences with it, and I think it would take a much larger scale study to find any correlations on this. Sadly it’s already hard enough to do studies on MAPs, so doing studies on MAPs who’ve come out will yield even less results. I’ve come out to 4 people only, and will probably not come out to anymore.

Person 1:

• Related? Yes
• How long have we known eachother? All my life.
• Higher education? Yes
• Minority? No
• Religious? No
• Acceptance level? Accepting, but doesn’t really want to talk about it any more than necessary
  
  Person 2:
• Related? No
• How long have we known eachother? About 80% of my life
• Higher education? No
• Minority? No
• Religious? No
• Acceptance level? Very accepting and can talk about it as much as I want
  
  Person 3:
• Related? No
• How long have we known eachother? About 35% of my life
• Higher education? Yes
• Minority? No
• Religious? No
• Acceptance level? Accepting, but doesn’t really want to talk about it any more than necessary
  
  Person 4:
• Related? No
• How long have we known eachother? About 40% of my life
• Higher education? No
• Minority? Yes
• Religious? No
• Acceptance level? Accepting, and will talk about it when I need to/want to
  
  So that doesn’t really tell much. However, I do think that all of these people share a high sense of empathy, which I would imagine is necessary for understanding the struggles a pedophile has been through instead of just seeing the fact that they’re a pedophile.