Humanist chaplain James Croft has a perfect little essay on his blog today. It's called "No Space for the Supernatural."

Once we can explain something, he says, we don't call it "supernatural" anymore. It's just part of the real world. We can do science on it. We can learn to predict its next occurrence.

We tend to reserve the word "supernatural" for something we can't explain, but that word doesn't convey the missing explanation, so it adds nothing useful.

Moreover, if we can't even predict the strange behavior we're talking about, "then we are not picking out any particular phenomenon." That seemingly random flash of light in the sky could be an airplane, a meteor, a ghost. What's the point of calling every unidentified flash of light "supernatural"? That word doesn't help us predict when we might see a light in the sky nor identify which kind of light it might be.

Croft pivots, declaring "the sting in the tail for naturalists": "if 'supernatural' is not a useful term, what on earth does 'natural' mean?"

The terms we ought to prefer, Croft proposes, are "the random, the unexplained, and the explained."

I immediately take this somewhere. You may have already guessed where.

I take it to a trans place.

Trans people are already real

The notion of "trans" itself is frequently criticized. I put that sentence in passive voice because various people wrestle with the word for various reasons. Some cis people are intentionally hostile to trans people, some feel curmudgeonly about whatever they imagine trans identity or trans experience to mean, some are more lightly skeptical, some are productively curious in a friendly way, and then there are trans people grappling with our own self-conceptions of being trans.

What, indeed, is "trans"? Who is crossing which boundary? Were we trans before we crossed it? If not, how did we know we wanted to cross it? If the binary doesn't exist to be crossed, then how can anyone be labeled as trans or cis?

I think we sometimes use the word "trans" in a way that reflects the parts of life we can explain and attempt to predict.

We speak about bodies: what our bodies were like when we formed in the womb, how our bodies have surprised us since then, and how we've chosen to change them.

We speak about psychology: how we understand ourselves or others.

We speak about how we show up in society: what it all means, with anticipation of how we'll all interact.

But I also think we sometimes use the word "trans" to refer to what we can't yet explain or predict.

Trans: the fence we're about to jump to see whether it's really there and whether we can transcend it.

Trans: the fence we've already jumped, thus proving it's there yet that it only partly tethers us.

Someday we may get to a point where we can all discuss our genders simply in terms of how explainable they are. For example, we might say:

Why do other people see me as a man? That's briefly explainable: Because I have a beard and wear pants.

Why do I choose to look the way I do, and why do people so quickly stereotype each other as men and women based on characteristics we know can change? Hmm, I can't explain all that right now! I'm running short on time! Sorry!

Our collective discourse doesn't yet always operate that way, and there remain many situations in which the words trans and cis are helpful.

But trans doesn't mean "supernatural," and cis doesn't mean "natural." The idea of "the supernatural" doesn't make sense, so neither can the idea of "the natural" exist as its opposite. The words trans and cis must attempt to do something else.

As a trans person, I can't yearn to become natural. Such a desire would embed a belief that I'm currently outside nature. I'd be maintaining an incoherent worldview. If my gender weren't natural, what would it be? A ghost?

While we're here: to be trans is not necessarily to wish to be cis.

I'm happy to surprise myself and others by achieving things previously believed impossible. I may cross boundaries. I may expand concepts.

But to stick within a rational framework, I am not impossibility longing to become possible. Logically, I can't be impossible. I am already possible because I am here.

Tucker Lieberman is as natural as he can be, but it's nothing to brag about. tuckerlieberman.com