-I don't believe that homosexuality and true pedophilia (an attraction to, if not preference for, prepubescent children) are mental illnesses because, I would argue, the concept of mental illness is incoherent but if one accepts the concept as legitimate it seems to me that they could pass the criteria. Legitimate illness leads to biological dysfunction (i.e. death, on principle or in theory, it prevents the body as a biological system from literally functioning). The mental states or dispositions to those states that are classified as pathological (or at least arbitrarily when they reach a certain level of presumed intensity, duration or frequency) don't, they are 'illnesses' ultimately because those mental states are considered bad. The physiological correspondents of subjective stress can cause an inter-subjectively demonstrable negative effect on our bodily health but that doesn't legitimize the idea of a mind itself being unhealthy or dysfunctional (a knife can cause injury but the knife is not the dysfunction, the injury is). If you are a philosophical materialist then you should reject my claim that the concept of mental illness is fundamentally incoherent although the fact still remains that 'mental illness' in practice has nothing to do with observable biological dysfunction (I reject materialism. As an epistemic solipsist, I have to remain open to the possibility of both idealism and some form of dualism but I can confidently rule out materialism with justified certainty. A/the physical world might exist, my consciousness must necessarily exist. I can be justifiably certain about the existence of one but not the other because they are/would be fundamentally different things). I don't want to make a detailed post outlining my grievance with the concept of mental illness and psychology as a non-empirical science in general, I have already somehow wasted my day away so this is somewhat rushed.
My point is that psychologists often seem to shirk around this by claiming that certain behaviors are 'maladaptive.'
-I am an overly repetitive broken record when it comes to human fertility and how I believe it relates to subjective attraction (I feel guilty about some of my last post because I'm not trying to put older women down, on top of the fact that I was simplifying things and generalizing. I suffer from crippling body image problems and mid-life despair and would happily be 34, or even 38, again if I could; I wish that pleasurable sex/romance could be for everyone and no one struggled with unrequited attraction, but I wanted to be brutally honest and logical to the best of my ability. Please challenge my logic if you think that I'm wrong) but here is a simple fact- the biological function of sperm cells is to fertilize egg cells (nature didn't consciously design sperm cells with this in mind but that's what they are, in a manner of speaking, 'adapted to do'). Men don't need penises to urinate, penises evolved in mammals (and some other animals, I believe) because they helped enable mammalian males to fertilize egg cells. Contrary to what porn might have you believe, nature did not design semen to be body art or makeup for women. Men are biologically adapted to fertilize egg cells, that defines maleness. Sexual reproduction is the only reason why genders exist (life itself is ultimately not female by default as I once heard someone claim, asexually reproducing microorganisms are neither male or female. The rare animal species that reproduce through obligate parthenogenesis are female but they descend from sexually reproducing species).
If someone's body produces sperm or ovulates (even without ovulation, the lining of a girl's/woman's uterus only thickens in preparation for pregnancy, in the absence of that menstruation follows. In other animals, that material is reabsorbed by the body internally) it is trying to get them to reproduce. I don't see any way around this, regardless of one's own subjective preference; every man's body is biologically adapted to impregnate human females and every woman's body is adapted to be impregnated by a man so, considering that, being attracted to same-sex people or prepubescent children implies a mismatch between subjective desire and the biological "purpose" of your actual body.
-There was never a good reason to consider homosexuality a mental illness and there isn't a good reason to consider pedophilia a mental illness but if the concept has any legitimacy at all, it seems to me that fundamentally non-reproductive sexual preferences would very meaningfully fall under 'maladaptive.' That said, if I didn't think that the concept of mental illness is incoherent (which is a big hypothetical stretch because unlike a green sky or purple fire I believe the concept is just fundamentally illogical, 'health' can't coherently refer to two fundamentally unrelated things) homosexuality and pedophilia being mental illnesses would have no moral implications, in my view, because I don't value health as an end in itself. The question for me would still be, 'do they cause actual suffering? Can they be a source of happiness for people?' I'd be ok with a mental illness that didn't ultimately cause pain or deprive anyone of happiness or make anyone the kind of person who doesn't want others to experience happiness and be free from suffering.