Journalist outs transgender con man while investigating story - Unethical or not?

[Lamia]

@Marley23

Other people in this thread have taken a more negative view.

Then I would appreciate it if you did not quote my posts when you are really responding to things that other people have said.

You asked what about this article could not be explained by cluelessness. I feel like I’ve done a pretty thorough job of explaining my view and how I arrived at it, and I’ve quoted specific passages that seemed worse than merely clueless to me. You keep giving me this “Well, maybe Hannan didn’t mean it that way” stuff, and I want to know why you’re so certain that he was just clueless. Because while some of the things that bothered me about this article could be attributed to Hannan being clueless, it seems pretty darn implausible to me that he outed Dr. V to Kinney out of cluelessness alone.

[GrandWino]

The way Dr. V was described, her looks and her voice, it seems that most people with eyeballs and a brain would probably assume she was not originally born with lady parts. The reporter was clued in by a third party but that’s because he hadn’t met her face to face himself yet. If he ever had, he likely wouldn’t have had to be clued in by anybody.

What I’m saying is that I don’t think he outed her to anybody that didn’t already have a pretty strong hunch about the situation.

I think she killed herself for some reason other than being outed as TG to an investor (and I don’t think she was outed). It was probably because her massive fraud was being unraveled. Or she could have been dumped or just had a bad case of the sads that day, we don’t know and one guess is as good as any. But that’s much harder to work up recreational outrage over.

[Longshanks]

Journalists have a code of ethics, one of the codes is to not release any info which is not pertinent or could do undue harm to the subject of the piece. In this case it was the transgender conman, so I’m gonna go with it being unethical.

[Marley23]

That should be an and, Longshanks, not an or.

[nevadaexile]

If she/he/it had been convicted and sentenced to prison, then the “secret” would be out, wouldn’t it? After all transgendered individuals are sent to the prison which incarcerates their original gender.

They are placed into protective segregation (for obvious reasons) but they are also “outed.”

[Marley23]

The female pronoun will do just fine, and I’m not sure she did anything illegal- although I can imagine an investor might have sued her.

[Waenara]

I agree that I’m not sure she did anything that was actually illegal. Misrepresenting your educational background and family connections to investors is unethical, but is it illegal? As the investor in the article says, she didn’t take the money and run. She used the money to research, create a product, market it (on infomercials and maybe elsewhere?) and fulfill customer orders.

I also would have liked if the article had tried to do any more research into whether the club actually “worked” (e.g. if the design really was useful or revolutionary). The part about psychology was interesting - if you expect a “scientifically advanced” club then you become a better putter, and if you think it’s a fraud then it no longer works as well for you. And the reporter mentions that some golfers (and himself) used the putter for a while and then stopped.

But then was a part where he mentioned some technical analysis of the club:

But the more I talked to people in the world of club design, the more I came to understand that many believed the physics behind the Oracle putter were solid, even if the “scientist” was not. I found Kelvin Miyahira, a golf instructor in Hawaii with no ties to Yar who nonetheless had become one of its biggest fans. Miyahira had used a high-speed camera to compare the Oracle with other, more popular putters. In slow-motion videos he posted to YouTube, he showed that when he used the Oracle, it was more stable and rolled the ball more smoothly and with less sidespin than any of the other clubs he tried.

I think it would be good to follow up on that and see if there really is anything to the “zero MOI” club (and I know nothing about golf - but it sounds like a neat idea).

[Una_Persson]

@nevadaexile

If she/he/it …

Genuine class. :rolleyes:

[grude]

@monstro

The most analogous thing that came to my mind when I read the article was racial passing. What if all of this had happened in 1950-something, and we were talking about someone who was passing as a white person. Would it have been wrong for Hannan to expose Dr. V. as a person with significant black ancestry to a world that sees black ancestry as something shameful? Would her passing as white be akin to lying bout her credentials?

It’s a tough one. It’s easy to say that passing as white is not at all similar to lying about where one to school, but is it? If Dr. V had been known as a black person, no one would have given her the time of day, let alone hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not in the world of golf, the domain of exclusive country clubs.

But still, it’s a detail that is more salacious than significant.

One thing keeps me from laying all the blame on Hannan is I think there’s a good chance Dr. V would have bailed out even if he had never uncovered the transgendered thing or told anyone about it. She had to know that he was bound to discover her past with enough digging and that it was just a matter of time before SOMEONE found out. Perhaps assurances from him that he would keep the secret would have kept her from killing herself, but I have my doubts.

This kind of reminds me of the article about the conwoman “welfare queen” I posted awhile back.

The Real Story of Linda Taylor, America’s Original Welfare Queen

The author points to evidence of her faking being black, that she was born to white parents and all her siblings and her were considered white for her early life. And I think he also had a quote from a relative that she is not in fact black.

This seems incidental to most of her scams, and it appears she may have started claiming it for non-nefarious reasons(well if fitting in with your maybe kidnapped kid is non-neferious heh).

I don’t know.

[Lamia]

@nevadaexile

If she/he/it had been convicted and sentenced to prison, then the “secret” would be out, wouldn’t it?

I am probably wasting my time responding to someone who’s not even clear on whether transgender people count as human, but it is not the job of a journalist to play judge, jury, and executioner. There’s all kinds of personal information about Essay Anne Vanderbilt that might have come out in a trial, but it hadn’t, because she wasn’t on trial. She hadn’t even been charged with a crime.

After all transgendered individuals are sent to the prison which incarcerates their original gender.

This is true for many but not all transgender convicts. Post-op transwomen are often assigned to women’s prisons.