+Empirically, [there are](https://transblog.grieve-smith.com/2017/01/28/all-other-things-being-equal/) people who experience significant-but-not-crippling levels of gender dysphoria, who are certainly likely to have _thought_ about—considered—dreamed of transitioning, but who haven't been desperate enough to make the leap in real life given their present circumstances.
+
+Indeed, if "transness" is a unimodal continuous quantity, we should expect there to be far more maybe-trans-under-the-right-circumstances people than people who would be "trans at any cost", for the same reason there are more "merely" six-foot-tall people than there are towering seven-foot-tall people—
+
+![dysphoria distribution]({filename}/images/dysphoria_distribution.png)
+
+Those of us who are dysphoric enough for the question to come up, but not so dysphoric for the answer to be overdetermined, have a serious choice to make: would a gender upgrade be worth it, taking into account everything that would be lost?—from the burden of being a lifelong medical patient, to potentially vastly increased difficulty finding a job or a romantic partner.
+
+(Serano herself has [written about how hard it is to find a cis woman partner as a trans woman](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/14/the-struggle-to-find-trans-love-in-san-francisco.html)—and people who, unlike Serano, don't have the "plus" of being a reasonably successful (and thus, high-status) activist should expect to do even worse. Even if one is inclined to attribute such costs to transphobic prejudice that wouldn't exist in a more just Society, this is of little help to individuals who face the dating market that actually exists in our own world, and not that of a socially-just utopia.)
+
+Returning to Serano's hypothetical: $10 million is a life-changing amount of money, enough to buy one's way out of many life problems. I find it not at all surprising or trollish to think that that kind of consideration could swing a great many people from "gender-dysphoric to some degree, but not desperate enough to do much about it, for fear of losing jobs, friends, _&c._" to actually becoming transsexuals.
+
+The intrinsic-identity view can be seen as the limiting special case of the economic view where demand for transitioning is infinitely [inelastic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity_(economics))—
+
+![two models of demand for transitions]({filename}/images/transition_demand.png)
+
+This insight helps us make sense in secular changes in the expression of gender variance. The phenomenon of [increases in transgender identification](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/health/transgender-population.html) that some commentators characterize as [_social contagion_](https://youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org/tag/social-contagion/) could also be seen as an entirely _rational_ response to incentives: as being trans becomes less costly—whether due to increased social acceptance, improvements in surgical or hormone-administration technology, or any other reason—we _should_ see more gender-dysphoric people doing something about it on the margin.
+
+Perhaps demand is sufficiently inelastic such that the intrinsic-identity model is a decent approximation. But analyses of where Society's flirtation with [the transgender tipping point](https://newrepublic.com/article/118451/what-transgender-tipping-point-really-means) is heading should take into account the extent to which, in our present state of information, we _don't know_ what the demand curve for sex changes looks like.