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)
+![dysphoria distribution]({static}/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 increased difficulty finding a job or a romantic partner.
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)
+![two models of demand for transitions]({static}/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.