Coy Mathis, a first grade biological male from Colorado, identifies as a girl. She dresses as a girl, her teachers refer to her as female and until recently, she used the girls’ restroom at school.

After Eagleside Elementary banned Coy from using the girls’ lavatory — offering the boys’ or faculty restrooms instead — a transgender rights group filed suit against the school for gender discrimination.

This is where critics of the parents flooded in.

What sort of neo-hippie liberal parents would allow their child to decide its gender?

I understand the sentiment. Kids are dumb.

When I was in first grade, my career goal was to be a Power Ranger. I knew their hiring standards were lax, and I wanted nothing more than to karate chop Rita Repulsa’s smug face in half and do the Macarena on the pink ranger.

I still don’t know what “Macarena” means, but it’s decidedly sexual here, at least in the way a first grader perceives sex.

That’s the second argument. Children have the most limited understanding of sexual anatomy and gender, which is a social construct that seeks to divide behaviors and interests as either male or female.

Despite this, I maintain that if a child is experiencing discomfort conforming to gender norms, that child knows him or herself better than a wave of condescending strangers.

Also, his or her story is not analogous to a first grader wanting to be a Power Ranger.

Gender identity, with its innumerable shades, is hard to pin down and when denied can have severely detrimental psychological effects.

Children shoehorned into expected gender roles might experience behavioral problems, depression or even suicidal thoughts, according to American Psychological Association.

Sometimes it’s uncertain whether gender nonconformity is permanent or transitory, but Coy’s parents’ support is better than the alternative, even if you think they’re a little too gung-ho.

Historically, our society has gone to great lengths to catalog everyone in neatly defined groups, inventing new and often nonsensical rules to simplify judgment when necessary.

For instance, when mixing between blacks and whites made it too difficult to make racial distinctions, laws like Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act sprang forth, deeming anyone with a single drop of African blood to be considered “black.”

There was this fear of the unknown then — of foreign contamination chipping away at white racial identity, distorting it until it no longer existed.

Today, educated opinion has calmed those anxieties, but the feelings of unease are re-awakened and amplified when we attempt to define people on the basis of gender.

To be transgender is particularly offensive because it means to exist in an uncomfortable gray area of our society’s understanding of gender.

What do we do with a biological woman who identifies her gender as male or a biological man who identifies as female?

What do we do with someone whose gender falls somewhere in between?

Even some of the most understanding among us lack the vocabulary to refer to such a person in conversation. “Do we say ‘he’?” we ask. “She?” Is it offensive to use transgender as a noun or say “transgendered”?

Many do not even know the meaning of “transgender.”

Unable to differentiate between definitions like transgender or transsexual, we lump them together or downright ignore them.

We view them inwardly only as inconvenient outliers or defects.

We acknowledge them fleetingly in public — with bemusement as if they were entertaining spectacles, or with a sliver of disgust as if we were just back-splashed while defecating in a public restroom.

We tell them to compromise, like Coy, because we do not understand how important using your gender’s bathroom is to your sense of self. And didn’t we go over this already? Separate but equal is not equal.

We fail to see the human being before us, instead fixated on our own failure to classify them, and that is what’s most damning.

Denying Coy the right to use the girls’ bathroom isn’t just denying a place to pee — it’s denying her right to be the person she envisions herself to be, as if anyone’s identity ever relied on someone else’s permission.

Aaron Friedman is a 22-year-old Spanish senior from Destrehan.