+But economics isn't, fundamentally, about money. Economics, like life itself, is about _trade-offs_. Any decision you make—whether it's to exchange money for some material good, or move to a different city, or transition to the other gender, arises out of the tension between your need for that choice and your ability to do without, a tension that is resolved into a decision by the calculus of cost: of how much of everything else in life would need to be sacrificed in order to achieve it, whether the sacrifice be extracted in money, in time—in social ostracism—in existential anguish—in blood.
+
+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))—