I don’t recall anyone here saying that. :rolleyes:
You were a close personal friend, were you?
If not, that is the most bizarre thing I’ve seen in this thread to date - how dare you presume to make such a statement?
Every reporter checks his facts and his sources. Had she been a non-story, he would not have done the (routine) background check, and she could still be out there defrauding people.
When you call a reporter, be convincing.
Think of it as calling the cops - what you want investigated is not the only thing they are going to look at.
Reporters are not servants - you do not tell them “You can’t ask about X” - especially when X is the credibility of the person telling the story.
p.s. - I read it as “here’s a story where absolutely nothing is as it seems”.
Really? Because about all I know now is the club might suck because a liar made it. Where did you read that he ascribed her gender any importance at all to whether or not the golf club worked as advertised?
I think you are too blinded by rage to realize you completely understood his supposition. Success in golf is often as much about confidence as it is about science or skill. That’s the broader point of the article. That’s why he says:
If you’re working on a story that touches on some kind of complex or controversial issue, it’s not unreasonable to ask a writer or editor who is familiar with that issue to weigh in with a perspective that someone else might have missed. This wasn’t a breaking news story; it was a feature that they worked on for a long time.
Part of the problem here is that these issues are not familiar to most people. They’re pretty well known on the SDMB at this point because people have been talking and arguing about them for 10 years or more, but for a lot of people - including Hannan and Simmons - this is unfamiliar turf. I wouldn’t expect them to grasp the implications of outing someone or why referring to Vanderbilt as “he” late in the story would come across as offensive. (Although he actually continues to call her “she” throughout the story; only in a paragraph about Krol’s old life does Hannan use the male pronoun.)
Who?
You aren’t talking about the writer over in the baseball side of ESPN that didn’t work for Simmons, but got called in to write after this issue blew up, are you?
At best, the complex issue is outing someone. That has little to do with being transgender, and more to do with journalistic ethics, liability, and storytelling. Those are all things her bosses know more about than the trans writer likely does. The article doesn’t talk about what it’s like to be trans, or the implications of transitioning, etc.- things another trans person might have some insight on. I don’t see why asking that writer is necessary at all. Especially since it’s based on the premise that her opinion would be different or more insightful because of her gender. Seems pretty presumptuous to me.
It’s not just journalistic ethics, though. It’s about the implications of outing someone to a business partner. Vanderbilt’s investors and partners have a right to know that she fabricated her entire background; that she was TG isn’t relevant from that standpoint. Grantland didn’t get that, and Kahrl - or someone who was just familiar with these issues - probably would have. There’s nothing wrong with reporting the fact that she was TG, but in that part of the story, Hannan treated her status as part of the fraud. People here are complaining that the story implies transgender people are frauds, and in that part of the story he comes close to that implication.
I don’t think I accused anyone here of that. I think that’s the main point of that article, despite the writer fluffing it up with some MOI stuff he doesn’t understand and criticizing Vanderbilt for using big words he has to look up. What a punk. Oh, but he gets the last laugh! Teach her to mess with him. He can google.
Did you actually read the thing, levdrakon?
Looks like levdrakon did in post #95.
Yeah, what’s the point of the article? Is it called “Golfer Superstition?” Is it called, “A detailed analysis of the Yar club?” Or is it the “Sad Tale of Dr. V”
It’s a self-serving little ego wank for Hannan, and it wouldn’t have been published if not for the transgender revelation and subsequent suicide.
I answered this already. Obviously I got it wrong. Can I revise my answer to “The point of the article is Grantland Is Evil and only an internet uproar can stop them?”
Who are you to presume what is relevant to those people? It’s their money, and they can use whatever criteria they’d like to decide who to give it to. Medical issues become relevant to business deals all the time. Besides, it’s just rank speculation on your part that her investors cared one iota about her being born a man. In fact, the one guy they seems to speak most about didn’t even seem to feel he was conned in a traditional sense. Just because he reported reported ALL he found out doesn’t mean every piece of info he revealed affected their opinions of her or the club.
Really? Plenty of people would disagree with you about that. In fact, that seems to be 90% of the concern for people.
It is part of the fraud in the sense that she sold her invention based on her story and credentials. It’s like a conservative pastor who is a closet homosexual, or a congressman that likes to send people pictures of his penis, or a presidential candidate who hides a chronic disease. Some jobs and positions are uniquely dependent on your background and story, and require a higher standard of transparency. It’s not that being trans is bad, and neither is being gay, sexting consenting adults, or having a disease. It’s that it’s material omission that her investors, at the very least, needed to know about. They signed on to selling her image and story, and she was not upfront. Your confusion seems to stem from your conflating who was “defrauded”. The reporter was not defrauded because Dr. V didn’t reveal she was born a man, her investors were because she didn’t tell them her actual story, and they created a product sold on that lie.
Her backers believed her story and touted her credentials when they promoted the putter.
I didn’t say anyone cared. I said Hannan shouldn’t have outed her to Kinney. It wasn’t relevant in the broader picture. This is one of those issues that a transgender person (or someone who knows about LGBTQ stuff) could have brought to Grantland’s attention.
No kidding.
‘Small business owner who made a really good putter’ is not one of those positions. She wasn’t violating her stated beliefs or abusing the electorate’s trust. The fact that she made up important parts of her life story matters because she was using that life story to do business. The fact that she was born male doesn’t come into play there.
No, it wasn’t a material omission, and on it’s own it wouldn’t have been anyone else’s business unless she chose to go public. What was material were all the lies about her background and expertise. If Vanderbilt’s credentials had been legit, a story that outed her would have been cruel and would have drawn a lot more criticism on the grounds that it was transphobic. On the other hand if she’d been transgender and had still been a fraud, Hannan still would have come away with a story worth telling. To me that’s why it’s ultimately OK to report that she was transgender: because she gave herself a new name and a new background and used it to sell her putter - even the fact that she was a woman got her attention - it’s inseparable from the fraud and totally impractical to just delete it from the rest of the reporting.
Well, sure. That’s what I meant when I talked about mumbo-jumbo in my post. I don’t think Ms. V’s line of BS was any different from all the nonsense I see about golf equipment. There’s a golf store around the corner from my office, and the displays there are chock-full of pseudo-scientific nonsense.
Of course the club performed better when people thought it was special. Isn’t that how every ridiculously expensive golf club works?
I thought she was already a writer for Grantland. Perhaps not. :smack:
I don’t understand the idea that you have to be familiar with trans issues to understand that outing a trans person is wrong. Outing any minority is wrong. The only way the article can be seen as okay, from my perspective, is if the author didn’t think she was actually trans, and that the gender switch was also part of the con. (And, in fact, that’s the way I read it.)
I do not get the reading a lot of you get that the death was no big deal to the author, either. It’s kinda the entire point of the article. The article is the tragedy of Anne Vanderbilt. The stuff about the putter is just a lead-in to the main story of a con artist who killed herself rather than be outed. The con itself is presented exactly like those literary stories where the person lives a lie so long that they prefer to keep it.
And that’s the reason I don’t think the author thought of it in terms of transgenderism. The use of “she” thoughout the article is just because Dr. V had effectively become the lie. I don’t think he ever thought she had thought of herself as female before the name change. That’s why he refers to her as male up until the change.
You mean, despite the fact that a version of the article was already linked in this very thread that did get rid of it? It’s not impractical in the slightest.
Not that I’d argue that, after her death, he necessarily needed to completely not report it. He just needed to be more sensitive to it. He needed to make it clear that the transgenderism was not a part of the fraud. And he needed to show the insight that maybe she did kill herself not because she was to be outed as a fraud, but because she was to be outed as trans. He needed to show some guilt and self-reflection. And then the story could become a cautionary tale instead of just a tragedy.
Again, the only way I can excuse him for this is that he never really thought of it as a trans issue. Even if he didn’t know how to handle such issues, that only means he should have asked for help.
Someone who believes in civil rights, I’d suppose. It’s the same reason I can say that finding out she was gay but pretending to be straight is irrelevant. The only reason you need to know is if you plan on discriminating against her for that information. Discriminating against someone for their status as a minority is wrong.
It’s the same reason I can presume someone’s religion is irrelevant to their employer.