@KatieCruz what would the disordered part be? Don't researchers usually use Wakefield's "harmful dysfunction" criteria? Usually hanging off the idea of reproductive sex and disorders being those sexual preferences which inhibit reproducing the species? Of course, I and many other people think that's bollocks: how can you explain why exclusive / preferential homosexuality is not a disorder if their sex is non reproductive? You can't. So why is preferential attraction and / or mutually willing sexual behavior between older and pre / pubertal people any different? As far as non reproduction is concerned, they're not. As Richard Green correctly argued, the same criteria used to de list homosexuality as a mental illness apply the same to pedophilia.
The reality is that teleiophilia is not a disorder bc the DSM is political in nature. It's about what's popular/unpopular. Michael Seto and even the 1st round of recent updates to the DSM, argue that pedophilia constitutes sexual orientation. I think the conclusion is inescapable. But after public backlash, the DSM text was changed... Again, it's about politics: what's popular/unpopular, not what's consistent logically and / or with the evidence...
What is really interesting, is non exclusive teleiophilia. Let's get more research into the MAP adjacent teleios. I am confident that, especially in men and possibly in women depending on the culture (I am thinking of Japan and how women are the main creators of Shota), the human preference for neoteny extends far lower in age than most people would willingly admit. We see this when people remark how "cute" and "pretty" someone's kids are. They find them attractive, not preferentially, but attractive nonetheless. My thinking is that teleiophilia is not as exclusive as many would like to think, and that "sexual" has very fluid, porous boundaries... And people sense this, they know it, and they project out their insecurities when faced with a stigmatizing culture and participate in the othering of non-normatives and paraphiles. (Just think, in the 70s and 80s Gayle Rubin was working on S&M activism and the courts would seriously argue that no sane person could want another person to seriously injured them. Tell that to the Masochists! XD)
It really scares me some times, the age taboo, the generational apartheid: the unhappiness that many are folding themselves into, just to fit in. You see a clearly well developed 17 YO you find sexy and, once you discover their age, you're supposed to pretend you never found them attractive to begin with. It's ridiculous really and I suspect a lot of people are privately very fed up of the bullshit...
Rant over :p