(I don't know though- is voluntary physical castration available and has it been shown to reduce the likelihood of becoming an abuser?).
I don't know, but it should be - it IS definitely available under the name of "gender reassignment surgery" and I would think that being a pedophile is at least as good a reason to cut off healthy body parts as "feeling like a woman".
It is not just another 'orientation'. The very position it starts from is one of abuse of power (as pp have said, very eloquently), and I think it is dangerous ground indeed to begin to frame it in this manner.
Sexual abuse of children is abuse of power, but not all men who do it are exclusively attracted to children.
There are many men who are supposedly happily married and whose wives never noticed anything weird, and who then turn out to have sexually abused children. Because children are easier victims than adult women, probably.
I cannot know whether pedophilia is a sexual orientation. I don't have it, and it is basically impossible to know what an other person feels.
Of course I am against punishing pedophiles for being attracted to children - that's punishing of thought-crime, and that's not legal in any civilised country.
But with someone who never uses child porn, never molests children ... that would be between him and his therapist, and possibly the hospital he gets castration at. The general public would never know. So it is mainly an academic discussion.
You said that a paedophile had no right to support or empathy because you could never be sure they hadn't acted on their desires. I pointed out that the same could be said about anyone.
Indeed, and we don't even punish men who watch adult rape porn (by which I mean porn in which a woman is obviously raped. The lack of true consent in all porn is another problem), even though it is obvious they are turned on by rape and could any moment decide that they want to rape a woman.