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.
-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. (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 _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.
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+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—
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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.
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 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.
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+PREPUBLICATION TODO—
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+ * 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
+ * incorporate Coach's simplification line edits if she has any
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff