There’s a certain attempt at offensive humor which has been circulating for a long time now, and I find myself thinking about it today. Please note this is me quoting the line for criticism, not endorsing it as a joke at all:

“Genders are like the Twin Towers. There used to be two of them, and now it’s a really sensitive subject.”

As a New Yorker who grew up in the latter chunk of the 20th century, there’s something that has particularly struck me about the parallel drawn in this unfunny attempt at a joke. An explanation of what I’m feeling about this requires a big chunk of background.

It can be confusing to think about now, given what the Twin Towers have come to represent since their destruction 24 years ago today, but when they were introduced New Yorkers did not really like them. The Twin Towers were actually pretty despised among most locals.

During a period of extreme economic downturn in the 1960s, the New York City government had used Eminent Domain to claim the land area for the construction of the Twin Towers and the rest of the World Trade Center complex. In this way the government dissolved the existing neighborhood and forced out the area’s diverse population of residents and businesses. A disproportionate amount of the workers and residents displaced by the World Trade Center project were immigrants of Middle-Eastern origin and their families. “Radio Row,” an area concentrated with mostly immigrant-owned and operated businesses, was torn down, along with what remained of Little Syria after most of it had been similarly eradicated a generation earlier by the construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. The self-labeled “Center” of “World Trade” came into being by forcing a whole lot of people – many poor, many immigrant, mostly non-white – out of work and out of their homes.

In addition to the immediate human cost of the WTC project, there were numerous architectural and aesthetic concerns with the finished product.

In a city full of classically-shaped and artistically-realized skyscrapers in imaginative shapes and styles – the glowing ziggurat spire of the Empire State Building, the regally-ornamented crown of the Chrysler Building, and so on – the Twin Towers’ plain-ass utilitarian cuboid rectangles were seen by many as ugly and devoid of imagination. A common quip thrown around back then was that the two crate-like Towers were “the boxes the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings came in.” In architectural terms the Twin Towers were front-runners of a still-ongoing wave of plain, dull, cheap-looking but expensive-to-rent buildings big business loved for the efficiency with which they could stuff their assets inside with no consideration for basic aesthetics or impact on the skyline or community.

Inside the Towers, meanwhile, while the tourist-friendly upper-level observation decks and restaurants featured huge glass portals to the highest view in town and an excuse for all those tourism-hungry government subsidies, the utilitarian working floors below were mostly oppressive spaces. I’d visited some of the non-touristy offices and working areas over the years, and I found them surprisingly gross places to be. The windows were very narrow 18-inch slits sandwiched between fat pillars, giving the place a jail-like feel for those who had to work in them. The promise of the highest views of the city possible was dashed by the fact that you had to look at it filtered through thick bars. Low ceilings on many of the floors only added to the stifling nature of the surroundings. To top it all off, or maybe bottom it all off, due to careless engineering decisions the Towers regularly drew rapid winds down into their own central pedestrian plaza forcefully enough to make it physically uncomfortable to walk, stand, or even sit. You could walk through the World Trade Center plaza on a calm day and get your hat blown off your head.

For all the deep and meaningful things the World Trade Center and Twin Towers incidentally came to represent upon their destruction in a terrorist attack, before that they had mainly represented pure concentrated gentrification in an unavoidable form to local people around in the Towers’ generation of origin. The concept, construction, and achievement of the World Trade Center and Twin Towers were a publicly-enforced monument to the fact that the privileged classes could bust in and do what they wanted without regard for the area’s preexisting community, personality, or value. The Towers were a forced landmark in the form of two big middle fingers extended toward anyone in view who remembered things being nicer before they were around.

To put it another way, during their existence the Twin Towers were their era’s symbol of how the loud and powerful could decide things for everyone around them at a whim just because they say so, regardless of the real impact on the lives and well-being of the thinking, feeling individuals poorly affected by the situation who never asked for any of it…

…and that’s something that could also be said for the social construct of rigid binary gender.

Maybe gender is like the Twin Towers, in that there are a lot of loud, powerful people trying their hardest to decide what’s best for everyone regardless of their ignorance of vital facts and the great deal of harm their bigotry-fueled ideas, decisions, and oppression directly inflict upon a lot of vulnerable people.

Trans rights are human rights.

Protect trans kids, and uplift trans adults.

Address people by their preferred names and pronouns.

Think things through and consider how they affect people.

Work to understand the various medical and social needs folks have, especially if they’re significantly unlike your own.

Act with kindness and empathy, and vote with them as well.