Gracie? I realize that I have just walked into the lion’s den. However, after reading your article, I felt as though I had to play the devil’s advocate on this subject. First of all, it would realistically be the decision for the American Psychiatric Association to make on whether or not pedophilia and hebephilia should be treated as one and the same, and the court of public opinion’s standpoint on this same matter has no bearing on such a decision. A decade ago a Canadian mental-health professional named Dr. Raymond Blanchard introduced a proposal to the American Psychiatric Association in an effort to splice pedophilia and hebephilia together as one adverse psychiatric diagnosis called “pedohebephilia.” However, the American Psychiatric Association ultimately decided to reject his proposal in 2013 upon publishing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (“DSM-5”), and I can confidently say that they definitely had good reasons for doing so. Second of all, I’m just as anti-pedophile as you are, and I agree that pedophilia should not be normalized; but I also do not believe that it should be sensationalized or misconstrued either, which was exactly what Dr. Blanchard’s underlying agenda involved. Because hebephilia, unlike pedophilia, is merely a social construct rather than an actual psychiatric disorder according to the DSM-5, the question of whether such a term describes an inclination that is permanent or finite in nature remains ambiguous to this very day; and it warrants that it never be confused or lumped in with pedophilia regardless of how attractive Dr. Blanchard may have made such a notion appear. I’m sorry that this wasn’t the reply to your article that you were hoping to receive, but it is what I have observed ever since this subject became widely discussed in our respective nations (the United States of America and Canada).