Florida Board Invited Pedophile Advocate to Weigh in on Trans Youth Medicine

BREAKING: The Florida Board of Medicine meets in four days to cut off access for transgender youth to gender affirming medical treatments. We’ve learned James Cantor, one of the key experts originally slated to speak to the board on Friday, then quietly removed, has long advocated on behalf of pedophiles.

by Evan Urquhart

the glowing profile page of Cantor, taken from a pedophilia advocacy organization

Tonight, we’ve just learned something truly shocking. The Florida Board of Medicine, which plans to drastically restrict access to gender affirming treatments for trans youth in the state in just four days, planned until recently to include James Cantor, a fringe researcher who has advocated for greater acceptance of pedophilia, according to the research of Quinnehtukqut McLamore. According to Zinnia Jones, a researcher who has been closely following anti-trans political developments in Florida, his name was first added, then quietly removed, from the Board’s schedule. How and why a pedophilia advocate was considered an expert in transgender children in the first place still remains a mystery.

If you’ve followed anti-transgender propaganda, you’ve likely heard the term “groomer.” It’s used more as an insinuation than an accusation, to imply that something about trans people, or the parents of trans youth, or doctors who treat young transgender patients is connected to the sexual abuse of children.

One man who has done among the most to advance this calumny is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose “Don’t Say Gay” bill has another name in the far right. They call it the “Anti-Groomer” bill. As such, they’ve long insisted that the purpose of preventing any mention of gay, lesbian, transgender, or other LGBTQ+ people in schools, even in as innocent a way as talking about diverse kinds of families, is all about protecting children.

However, if protecting children was such a priority, someone like James Cantor would never be allowed into the discussion of trans youth standards of care, much less relied on as an expert witness. Cantor, whose background is in pseudoscientific theories about sexual deviance, including the theory that pedophilia is a sexual orientation and the theory that all trans women are motivated by sexual arousal (so called “autogynephilia” theory), seems to have a close association with a notorious pedophile advocacy group* known as the Prostasia Foundation. While the precise nature of his connection with this group remained unclear as of this writing, we found at least one video featuring Cantor on the pedophilia advocacy group’s website. We also found an academic paper of Cantor’s from 2014, and just the title alone is quite disturbing: "Gold-star pedophiles" in general sex therapy practice. In it, Cantor argues for more leniency, understanding, and willingness to work with pedophiles among therapists, and a naive-seeming insistence that therapists can assess whether a patient has actually harmed children in real life, and if they say they haven’t, use therapy alone, without accountability, to prevent such harm from ever happening. He also seems to have tweeted that a P for pedophile belongs in the LGBTQ+ acronym, according to this internet archive of a tweet he made in 2018.

Jones was the first person we’re aware of who uncovered Cantor’s planned appearance, then removal, from the Board’s agenda. She explained the timeline for her discoveries in an interview via direct message on Twitter.

I found out last week on Thursday, October 20 that it had been rescheduled for October 28 via floridapolitics.com/archives/56546…. I went to the Florida Board of Medicine site and looked at the list of upcoming meetings, and clicked on the public book for the October 28 meeting. It was a 610MB PDF with 3336 pages, and I began going through it and labeling the content by author and subject in an ongoing Twitter thread. The next afternoon, Friday October 21, the link to the public book had been removed from the Florida Board of Medicine website, and the URL for that PDF was now a 404 not found error. I had saved a local copy of the PDF and reuploaded it so others could continue to review it, as I understood these materials were in the public interest.

This morning Monday October 24 I checked the Florida Board of Medicine site and saw that the link to the public book had been restored. I downloaded it and saw that the previous file had a last-modified date of 10/20, while this new file had a last-modified date of 10/21. I began running an Adobe Acrobat file compare between the original file and the new file, and the one change identified was the removal of James Cantor from the list of experts who would be present at the meeting.

In the coming days, we hope to find out more about Cantor, his history with advocacy for pedophiles, and the depth of his ties to those with anti-transgender politics. We suspect there may have been other times he’s been relied on as an expert, and we hope for developments to shed some light on how and why he was invited to contribute to the Board’s meeting in Florida. We’ll also cover any response from the community at hearing an advocate for pedophiles came so close to contributing to a decision on youth transgender healthcare. It seems remarkable that such a man could ever have been placed in such a role, but perhaps such is the depths of the hypocrisy of anti-trans zealots like DeSantis.

*A representative from Prostasia reached out several days after publication to request a correction on our characterization of them as a “notorious pedophile advocacy group.” While we did not agree that this required a correction, we agreed to apend an official comment from Prostasia on our coverage:

Prostasia Foundation is a child sexual abuse prevention organization led by experts, survivors, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Criticisms of Prostasia made in this article are misguided. The information and support programs that we provide concerning pedophilia are designed to prevent offending against children. They are evidence-based, mainstream within the prevention field, and align with the recommendations of groups such as the Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse (ATSA), our partner Stop It Now, and the Moore Center for the Prevention of Sexual Abuse at the prestigious Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.