James M. Cantor | |
---|---|
Cantor in 2010 | |
Alma mater | |
Occupation | Psychologist specializing in sexology |
Known for | Sex research, atypical sexualities |
Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions |
|
Website | jamescantor |
James M. Cantor is an American-Canadian clinical psychologist and sexologist specializing in hypersexuality and paraphilias. [1] [2] [3]
A former senior scientist with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, [4] [1] Cantor was editor-in-chief of the journal Sexual Abuse from 2010 to 2014. [5] His research on brain differences in pedophiles has been cited as evidence that pedophilia is something unchangeable and that people are probably born with it. [6]
Cantor grew up on Long Island, New York, and attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), [7] where he majored in computer science with minors in mathematics and physics. During his studies at RPI, he became a resident adviser in the student dormitories, where he provided peer counseling. Finding that he enjoyed doing this more than his studies, he decided to pursue a doctorate in psychology. [8]
After obtaining his MA in psychology from Boston University, he was awarded a PhD in clinical psychology by McGill University in 1999, supervised by Irv Binik and James Pfaus, for using oxytocin to reverse fluoxetine-induced sexual dysfunction in male rats. [9] [10]
After completing his PhD, Cantor worked in a psychiatric hospital that contained a sexual-behavior clinic and "phallometric laboratory" to assess men for pedophilia. [11] In 1998, he began his postdoctoral training at CAMH as an intern under Ray Blanchard. [7] He went on to become a senior scientist with CAMH and an associate professor in the University of Toronto's Department of Psychiatry. [4] From 2010 to 2014, he was editor-in-chief of the journal Sexual Abuse . [5] In 2019, Cantor left CAMH. [12]
Cantor was a member of a research community called the Pediatric and Adolescent Gender Dysphoria Working Group (PAGDWG) alongside older sexological researchers such as Blanchard, Kenneth Zucker, and J. Michael Bailey. The PAGDWG was active between 2018 and 2020 and was described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as helping "generate pseudoscientific support for denying gender-affirming care". [13]
In August 2020, Cantor left the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS), after conflicts with other members over transgender issues. [3] According to an article in the National Post , this occurred after Cantor was temporarily banned for an alleged pattern of bullying behavior. [3] [14] In an essay written to the organization, Cantor referenced J. K. Rowling's views on transgender topics. [3] [14] [15] Cantor also resigned from an editorial position for the SSSS's Journal of Sex Research . [3] The PinkNews article covering the events noted Cantor's support for LGB Alliance, often considered a transphobic or trans-exclusionary organization. [14] As of January 2021, he sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Sexual Aggression [16] and Archives of Sexual Behavior . [17]
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he published a series of papers advancing Blanchard's transsexualism typology. [12] At CAMH, he also authored a series of papers and editorials with Kenneth Zucker. [12] In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center described him as a "stalwart" of an "old guard" of "anti-trans" sexology researchers centered around CAMH who advocated treating transgender identities as a mental illness and promoted conversion therapy style cures. The SPLC reported their influence began to wane in the 2010s. [13]
Cantor's research centers on the development of sexual interests, including sexual orientation and paraphilias. [4] He has published on sex addiction, and atypical sexualities, including masochism, furries, vorarephilia, and others. [11] According to Laura Kane, writing in the Toronto Star , Cantor's work has "greatly influenced the view among researchers that pedophilia has a biological basis". [18] Using magnetic resonance imaging to examine the brains of male pedophiles, Cantor reported differences between them and the brains of non-pedophile offenders. [19] [20] [21] He found a significant decrease in the amount of white matter in their brains compared to control subjects, in addition to having lower IQ, and being shorter than average. This was interpreted as suggesting a link to early brain development. Cantor insists that these findings do not imply that pedophiles should not be held legally responsible for their actions. [22]
Cantor is one of the co-authors of a 2008 paper by Ray Blanchard, which proposed replacing the pedophilia diagnosis in DSM-5 with pedohebophilic disorder, [23] adding hebephilia as part of the definition, and differentiating it into three subtypes: pedophilic type (attracted to children younger than 11), hebephilic (attracted to children between 11–14), and pedohebephilic type (attracted to both age groups mentioned). [24] The main argument for this addition was that the DSM-IV-TR definition of pedophilia is not sufficient to cover attraction to "physically immature persons". [23] The proposal was criticized by Richard Green and Karen Franklin, mainly on the grounds that it pathologizes reproductively valid behavior in order to uphold current social and legal standards. [25] [26] The proposal did not appear in DSM-5.
Cantor's research suggests that sex addiction represents a variety of distinct problems, rather than a single unitary phenomenon. His typology of people seeking help for sex addiction includes paraphilic hypersexuals, avoidant masturbators, chronic adulterers, people with sexual guilt, and others. [27] [28]
On CNN in 2012, Cantor expressed the view that society should make it easier for persons who are sexually attracted to children but have never committed any sexual offenses to receive support and assistance in staying offense free. In his view, it is the sexual offenses (child molestation) and not the sexual attractions (pedophilia) that merit social sanctions. "One cannot choose to not be a pedophile, but one can choose to not be a child molester." [29]
Cantor believes that pedophiles who commit sexual offenses against children "do so when they feel the most desperate—when they have nothing to lose, nothing in their lives worth protecting". He recommends that therapists use cognitive behavioral therapy and other techniques to reduce feelings of isolation and hopelessness so that pedophiles can lead "productive, offense-free lives". [30] [31] Cantor stated that the online group Virtuous Pedophiles—a group for pedophiles who acknowledge having a sexual interest in children, and whose members share the belief that sexual activity between adults and children is wrong and always will be—could help prevent child sexual abuse. [32] [33] He states that pedophiles "experience desire, affection, and heartbreak as strongly as anybody else. It is a deep, dark, long-lasting ache, and they can't tell a soul." [7] He has rejected any linkage between homosexuality and pedophilia: "It's quite solidly shown in the scientific literature that there is absolutely no association between being a gay man and being a pedophile." [34] He vocally opposed the Boy Scout bans on openly gay participants. [35]
In an interview about sex addiction and hypersexuality, Cantor expressed mixed views. When asked if he believed sex addiction should be considered a mental illness, he said yes, but added that it may be important to not misuse a concept and diagnosis. [36] Cantor has expressed dislike for labels being used to describe sexual addiction. He has preferred to not assume one theory or another, and to instead use the term hypersexuality. [37]
Cantor has written that transsexuality is a phenomenon of the brain, saying that MRI research has verified the Blanchard typology of two different kinds of male-to-female transsexuals. One of these types (called "homosexual transsexuals") have brains like gay men, which possess some features more common among women, and another type (called "autogynephilic transsexuals" or "heterosexual transsexuals") which possess features that differ from typical brains, but not in a feminized direction. [38] [39]
Referring to research comparing BDSM practitioners with non-BDSM counterparts, Cantor said what was interesting was "how few differences and how small the differences were between these groups." He added, "Overall, it doesn't look like there is anything special that makes a person curious about BSDM. Instead, it seems that people who are extroverted and open to experience in general will experiment with all kinds of things—sex being just one of them." [40]
When asked by columnist Dan Savage to respond to a mother concerned about her son developing into a sexual sadist, Cantor wrote that having violent sexual fantasies, "doesn't mean anyone is likely developing into a psychopathic sex killer." [41]
In 2018, Cantor was hired as an expert witness by the Alliance Defending Freedom, on a case to ban trans girls from girls' school sports in the state of West Virginia. [42] [43]
In May 2022, the state of Alabama hired Cantor as an expert witness in defense of a law criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors with gender dysphoria. [44] However, on cross-examination, the federal judge discovered that Cantor had no clinical experience diagnosing or treating minors with gender dysphoria, or in monitoring such patients for improvements. [44] [45] [46] Cantor also lacked knowledge of the treatments and methods used in gender clinics in the state of Alabama. [44] [46] As a result, the judge wrote that he gave Cantor's testimony "very little weight". [44] [46]
In July 2022, the state of Texas similarly hired Cantor as an expert witness in defense of a directive from Texas Governor Greg Abbott to investigate parents of minors who receive gender-affirming care. [47] The directive was challenged by Lambda Legal and the ACLU on behalf of PFLAG. [48] According to an article in the Houston Chronicle , Cantor said that for minors experiencing gender dysphoria, the condition would usually desist and they would become cisgender gay or lesbian people. [47] The attorneys for the plaintiffs objected saying that the studies referred to "tomboys" and "effeminate" youth. [47] They further argued that Cantor lacked practical experience treating minors with gender dysphoria, and most of the studies he cited were published before 1988. [47]
In 2023, Cantor defended Florida governor Ron DeSantis' ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care for adults. [43] [49]
According to an October 2023 report by CBC News, since 2021, Cantor has testified in over 25 cases, including bills to restrict transgender healthcare, to ban trans students from school sports, and to restrict student use of school bathrooms. [12]
Cantor maintains a blog about sex research issues, Sexology Today. [50] He has been quoted in the media about several high-profile cases of unusual sexual behavior. Such cases have included politician Anthony Weiner, [51] entertainers Bill Cosby [52] and Mark Salling, [53] former Subway spokesperson Jared Fogle, [2] and incel attacker Alek Minassian. [54] [55] Cantor delivered the keynote address at the founding of the Netherlands Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers in 2015. [56]
In 2016, Cantor and his research were the subject of a documentary, I, Pedophile, which featured Cantor alongside interviews with male pedophiles. [57] The program followed him to the Prevention Project Dunkelfeld in Berlin, the only other center in the world conducting research into the neurological basis of pedophilia. In 2017, the program was nominated for but did not win the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television award for best social/political documentary. [58]
Cantor is gay, and describes himself as politically liberal and as an atheist. [59]
Hebephilia is the strong, persistent sexual interest by adults in pubescent children who are in early adolescence, typically ages 11–14 and showing Tanner stages 2 to 3 of physical development. It differs from pedophilia, and from ephebophilia. While individuals with a sexual preference for adults may have some sexual interest in pubescent-aged individuals, researchers and clinical diagnoses have proposed that hebephilia is characterized by a sexual preference for pubescent rather than adult partners.
A trans man is a man who was assigned female at birth. Trans men have a male gender identity, and many trans men undergo medical and social transition to alter their appearance in a way that aligns with their gender identity or alleviates gender dysphoria.
Chronophilia are forms of romantic preferences and/or sexual attractions limited to individuals of particular age ranges. Some such attractions, specifically those towards prepubescents and those towards the elderly, constitute types of paraphilia. The term was coined by John Money and has not been widely adopted by sexologists, who instead use terms that refer to the specific age range in question. An arguable historical precursor was Richard von Krafft-Ebing's concept of "age fetishism". Importantly, chronophilia are technically not determined by age itself, but by human sexual maturity stages, such as body type, secondary sexual characteristics and other visible features, particularly as measured by the stages of the Tanner scale.
The Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, also known as "ROMHC" or "The Royal" is a 284-bed, 400,000 square-foot psychiatric hospital located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is a major branch of the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group (ROHCG), which also encompasses the Brockville Mental Health Centre, the University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research and the Royal Ottawa Foundation for Mental Health.
John Michael Bailey is an American psychologist, behavioral geneticist, and professor at Northwestern University best known for his work on the etiology of sexual orientation and paraphilia. He maintains that male sexual orientation is most likely established in utero.
Fraternal birth order, also known as the older brother effect, has been correlated with male sexual orientation, with a significant volume of research finding that the more older brothers a male has from the same mother, the greater the probability he will have a homosexual orientation. Ray Blanchard and Anthony Bogaert first identified the association in the 1990s and named it the fraternal birth order effect. Scientists have attributed the effect to a prenatal biological mechanism, since the association is only present in men with older biological brothers, and not present among men with older step-brothers and adoptive brothers. The mechanism is thought to be a maternal immune response to male fetuses, whereby antibodies neutralize male Y-proteins thought to play a role in sexual differentiation during development. This would leave some regions of the brain associated with sexual orientation in the 'female typical' arrangement – or attracted to men. Biochemical evidence for this hypothesis was identified in 2017, finding mothers with a gay son, particularly those with older brothers, had heightened levels of antibodies to the NLGN4Y Y-protein than mothers with heterosexual sons.
The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism is a 2003 book by the American psychologist J. Michael Bailey, published by Joseph Henry Press.
Androphilia and gynephilia are terms used in behavioral science to describe sexual orientation, as an alternative to a gender binary homosexual and heterosexual conceptualization. Androphilia describes sexual attraction to men and/or masculinity; gynephilia describes the sexual attraction to women and/or femininity. Ambiphilia describes the combination of both androphilia and gynephilia in a given individual, or bisexuality.
Ray Milton Blanchard III is an American-Canadian sexologist who researches pedophilia, sexual orientation and gender identity. He has found that men with more older brothers are more likely to be gay than men with fewer older brothers, a phenomenon he attributes to the reaction of the mother's immune system to male fetuses. Blanchard has also published research studies on phallometry and several paraphilias, including autoerotic asphyxia. Blanchard also proposed a typology of transsexualism.
The American-Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard proposed a psychological typology of gender dysphoria, transsexualism, and fetishistic transvestism in a series of academic papers through the 1980s and 1990s. Building on the work of earlier researchers, including his colleague Kurt Freund, Blanchard categorized trans women into two groups: homosexual transsexuals who are attracted exclusively to men and are feminine in both behavior and appearance; and autogynephilic transsexuals who experience sexual arousal at the idea of having a female body. Blanchard and his supporters argue that the typology explains differences between the two groups in childhood gender nonconformity, sexual orientation, history of sexual fetishism, and age of transition.
Gender incongruence is the state of having a gender identity that does not correspond to one's sex assigned at birth. This is experienced by people who identify as transgender or transsexual, and often results in gender dysphoria. The causes of gender incongruence have been studied for decades.
Sexuality in transgender individuals encompasses all the issues of sexuality of other groups, including establishing a sexual identity, learning to deal with one's sexual needs, and finding a partner, but may be complicated by issues of gender dysphoria, side effects of surgery, physiological and emotional effects of hormone replacement therapy, psychological aspects of expressing sexuality after medical transition, or social aspects of expressing their gender.
Pedophilia is a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or older adolescent experiences a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Although girls typically begin the process of puberty at age 10 or 11, and boys at age 11 or 12, psychiatric diagnostic criteria for pedophilia extend the cut-off point for prepubescence to age 13. People with the disorder are often referred to as pedophiles.
The classification of transgender people into distinct groups has been attempted since the mid-1960s. The most common modern classifications in use are the DSM-5 and ICD, which are mainly used for insurance and administration of gender-affirming care.
Eli Coleman is an American psychologist and sexologist. He is professor emeritus and former director of the Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Minnesota. In 2007, he was appointed the first endowed Chair in Sexual Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School. He has published research on sexual orientation, sexual dysfunction and compulsivity, gender dysphoria, and sex offenders.
Kenneth J. Zucker is an American-Canadian psychologist and sexologist known for the living in your own skin model, a form of conversion therapy aimed at preventing pre-pubertal chidren from growing up transgender by modifying their gender identity and expression.
A transsexual person is someone who experiences a gender identity that is inconsistent with their assigned sex, and desires to permanently transition to the sex or gender with which they identify, usually seeking medical assistance to help them align their body with their identified sex or gender.
Erotic target location error (ETLE) is a hypothesized dimension for paraphilias, defined by having a sexual preference or strong sexual interest in features that are somewhere other than on one's sexual partners. When one's sexual arousal is based on imagining oneself in another physical form the erotic target is said to be one's self, or erotic target identity inversion (ETII).
Anne Alexandra Lawrence is an American psychologist, sexologist, and physician who has published extensively on gender dysphoria, transgender people, and paraphilias. Lawrence is a transgender woman and self-identifies as autogynephilic. She is best known for her 2013 book on autogynephilia, Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism, which has been regarded by Ray Blanchard as the definitive text on the subject. Lawrence is one of the major researchers in the area of Blanchard's etiological typology of transgender women and has been one of the most major proponents of the theory. While Blanchard's typology and autogynephilia are highly controversial subjects and are not accepted by many transgender women and academics, some, such as Lawrence, identify with autogynephilia. Lawrence's work also extends beyond Blanchard's typology, to transgender women and to transition more generally.
John Paul Fedoroff was a Canadian forensic psychiatrist, sexologist, and researcher who specialized in treating individuals with certain problematic paraphilias and/or individuals with developmental delay. He was the first director of the Sexual Behaviours Clinic (SBC) at the Institute of Mental Health Research at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre located in Ottawa, Ontario. He was a full professor of forensic psychiatry, criminology, and law at the University of Ottawa.