My question: why does Serano so blithely assume that _Yes_ respondents are just being wiseasses?
-It's [not that self-reports must necessarily be interpreted literally](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/). (Although it's less clear how Serano, who calls for people to "stop projecting what we wish were true about gender and sexuality onto other people, and instead learn to yield to their unique individual indentities, experiences, and perspectives", justifies her skepticism.) Nor is it that wiseasses don't exist, nor even that wiseass-<em>Yes</em>es are likely to be rarer than genuine-<em>Yes</em>es.
+It's [not that self-reports must necessarily be interpreted literally](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/). Nor is it that wiseasses don't exist, nor even that wiseass-<em>Yes</em>es are likely to be rarer than genuine-<em>Yes</em>es.
-Rather, speaking as someone who has gender problems and is [interested in doing _something_ about them](/tag/not-a-transition/) while also having reservations about what actually-transitioning would do to my health and social life, I'm wary that conceptions of transness that model it as a preëxisting atomic quality intrinsic to a person (whether it's called _gender identity_, _subconscious sex_, or something else) tend to obscure the the reality that undergoing the [series of interventions](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/) that constitutes transitioning is, necessarily, [_a choice_](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/)—an _important_ choice that needs to be made on the basis of a careful consideration of _all_ the costs and benefits, including base, temporal concerns like personal finance.
+(Although it's less clear how Serano, who calls for people to "stop projecting what we wish were true about gender and sexuality onto other people, and instead learn to yield to their unique individual identities, experiences, and perspectives", justifies her skepticism.)
-The logic of normative decisionmaking given limited resources is well-studied under the name _microeconomics_, one prominent feature of which is the _law of demand_: as something becomes cheaper, people demand more of it. The law of demand can be seen as a consequence of the principle of [_marginalism_](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html): decisions are made "on the margin", relative to an agent's current situation. Rather than needing or not-needing some good as a discrete binary, there exists a tension between the agent's need and its 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 that would need to be sacrificed in order to acquire the good, whether the sacrifice be extracted in money, in time—in social ostracism—in existential anguish—in blood.
+Rather, speaking as someone who has gender problems and is [interested in doing _something_ about them](/tag/not-a-transition/) while also having reservations about what actually-transitioning would do to my health and social life, I'm wary that conceptions of transness that model it as a preëxisting atomic quality intrinsic to a person (whether it's called _gender identity_, _subconscious sex_, or something else) tend to obscure the reality that undergoing the [series of interventions](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/) that constitutes transitioning is, necessarily, [_a choice_](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/)—an _important_ choice that needs to be made on the basis of a careful consideration of _all_ the costs and benefits, including base, temporal concerns like personal finance.
-It may sound strange to some readers to speak of _economics_ in this context, where many are used to thinking that if you're trans, you _need_ to transition to survive, and if you're not, then transitioning would be a nightmare. But 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 dyprhoria, 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.
+The logic of normative decisionmaking given limited resources is well-studied under the name _microeconomics_, one prominent feature of which is the _law of demand_: as something becomes cheaper, people demand more of it. The law of demand can be seen as a consequence of the principle of [_marginalism_](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html): decisions are made "on the margin", relative to an agent's current situation.
-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 six-and-a-half-foot-tall people—
+It may sound strange to some readers to speak of the _economics_ of transitioning—most people are used to thinking of economics as about the exchange of money for goods, and of transgenderedness as an identity that only impinges on the economic realm insofar as trans people have an acute medical need for goods and services like hormones and surgeries.
+
+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—
-Returning to Serano's dilemma: $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.
+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.
-The intrinsic-identity view can be seen as the limiting special case of the economic model where demand for transitioning is infinitely [inelastic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity_(economics))—
+(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.
-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.
+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))—
-Perhaps demand is sufficiently inelastic such that the intrinsic-identity model is a good 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.
+
-PREPUBLICATION TODO—
+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.
- * simplification pass
- * less schoolish opening
- * a concrete example of economic modeling of life decisions (coach suggested poor kids going to military)
- * concrete example of even Julia Serano not being able to find a date
+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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff