Last week, a Texas high school English teacher was fired after telling her class “don’t judge people for wanting to have sex with five-year-olds.” She urged students to swap the ugly word “pedophile” for “minor attracted person” (MAP.) Parents protested, but anyone following campus debates knew the script.The euphemism first bubbled up in journals and lecture halls. Dr. Allyn Walker, a transgender scholar now working with Johns Hopkins University’s Child Sexual Abuse Prevention unit, argued that unstigmatized “MAPs” are more likely to seek therapy before acting. Walker said respecting sexual desires should extend to desires most of us find evil and monstrous.Johns Hopkins has been here before. In the 1960s, Dr. John Money, the late psychologist celebrated by some as a gender identity pioneer, downplayed biological sex and championed radical “reassignment” experiments on children. Money’s legacy still echoes through progressive circles that treat feelings as destiny and that gender as fluid.Across the Atlantic, Scotland’s national police force quietly wrote training material calling child rapists “minor attracted people,” claiming the language would not “marginalize” suspects. Further north, Oslo professor Ole Martin Moen declared pedophilia a “natural sexual orientation” that must be studied and accepted without moral panic. Each time, critics howl and universities issue tepid clarifications, yet the vocabulary keeps spreading..Why now? Because every movement needs a fresh banner. After years of championing transgender causes, much of the left feels stalled. Public scepticism has risen, courtrooms are reconsidering youth hormone treatments, men are banned from most women’s sports, and even sympathetic mainstream media outlets admit detransition stories exist. A restless activist class is scanning the horizon for the next shiny toy, and some professors are handing them one, gift wrapped in the letters M-A-P.The logic mirrors earlier campaigns. First, rename the behaviour so it sheds stigma. Next, equate disagreement with bigotry. Finally, frame child-adult sex as a private orientation, no worse than any other. .The ground is being shifted in journals, conferences, and campus clubs. With classroom videos like the one from Texas, simply show the seeds are starting to sprout.None of this means society will soon legalize pedophilia. Most Canadians, left, right, or indifferent, still believe children deserve absolute protection. Yet language shapes law, and law guides behaviour. When police manuals and peer-reviewed papers adopt the same polite acronym, the lines begin to blur.We should listen to survivors, not theorists chasing notoriety. Protecting kids is not reactionary. .It is humane. If academics want to study prevention, fine, but stop sanitizing the crimes against innocent children. A five-year-old cannot consent, no matter how soothing the label. A child predator remains a child predator, and Canada should say so, plainly, before the shiny toy rolls out of the lecture hall and onto our streets. Sex with children is never acceptable regardless of what it is called.
