enqueue "Lesser-Known Demand Curves" for publication with final tweaks

One might wonder what better post I could have written that would have gotten
across the point better than this one ... but ultimately, artists ship.

diff --git a/content/drafts/lesser-known-demand-curves.md b/content/2017/lesser-known-demand-curves.md
similarity index 95%
rename from content/drafts/lesser-known-demand-curves.md
rename to content/2017/lesser-known-demand-curves.md
index 80972c0..70e0d61 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/lesser-known-demand-curves.md
+++ b/content/2017/lesser-known-demand-curves.md
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 Title: Lesser-Known Demand Curves
-Date: 2020-01-01 
+Date: 2017-12-15 16:20
 Category: commentary
 Tags: bullet-biting, epistemology, Julia Serano
 Status: draft
@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ The logic of normative decisionmaking given limited resources is well-studied un
 
 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.
+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 opportunity 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.
 
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@ Indeed, if "transness" is a unimodal continuous quantity, we should expect there
 
 ![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.
+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.
 
 (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.)