It was very courageous of him. If any of us went back to one of the later Chinese dynasties and tried to argue against the process of footbinding, we'd have reality on our side. What we would find, however, is the just about every facet of their society -- from the doctors to the political powers to the economic powers which profitted from the practice or produced the golden lotus shoes and the aesthetic taste setters -- would be dead set opposed to us in lock-step. Our position would be the minority position, the ridiculed one, the 'unscientific' one, because this was a widely accepted social custom no matter how horrific and nonsensical, and so every major culture-making institution would be marshalled in its defense. I think that we're in a similar place as far as trans issues go. The whole ideology first gained acceptance in academia not through some groundbreaking study that won a Nobel Prize and changed how we looked at the issue, but by a literal 'lunatics running the asylum' situation, wherein a trans advocacy group used case study subjects to pressure Northwestern politically to muzzle the actual experts on the subject, and the university caved. It then metastasized throughout our whole system. The 'consultants' that Walsh argued against are basically running a modern day protection racket similar to that run by the Robin DiAngelo types. You go to a company, quietly threaten that without your 'training' program they will be smeared and maligned as racist/transphobic/bigoted, and then the company shells out ludicrous amounts of money in order to subject their employees to pointless, retarded trainings so that the company doesn't have an online mob sent after them (or so an already existing online mob is called off). This results in people being browbeaten or at times outright cult brainwashed into an insane ideology. At the same time, there's a huge cottage industry of incredibly unscrupulous plastic surgery, hormones, and 'puberty blockers' being built up - and it's very lucrative. A single trans person can easily spend a million over the course of their lives mangling themselves into a simulacrum of a man or woman, and in many countries schemes have been set up to fund this insanity through tax dollars -- it's basically an instance of a cottage industry raiding the public treasury. Then you have its proliferation through Hollywood and other entertainment avenues. To go up against this is necessary, but it's very much a David vs. Goliath issue. The actual trans people may be mentally ill and pitiable, but the predatory industries that profit from their misery, the big entertainment organizations that glorify it, the universities who produce apologia for it, and the extortionate consulting groups that spread the ideology are all immensely powerful and very invested in continuing the insanity.
Just imagine if we decided that the cure for anorexia/bulimia was to get them lipo until they looked like how they felt on the inside. I half think that the pro-ana stuff way back was a similar attempt at turning a mental illness into a cash cow, and it didn't take off so they all switched gears to the trans issues.
