Not to pick on monstro here but I think it’s important to keep in mind that the way Vanderbilt presented herself to her investor was criminally fraudulent.
From the original article
So she was telling her investor that she was part of the famous and wealthy Vanderbilt family (and not some random person who just happened to share the name). And she led him to believe that her family connections would help insure the product’s success.
I understand why a journalist should try to not become part of the story but I can’t see how a journalist should avoid alerting a subject when it becomes obvious that the person is being bilked of thousands of dollars. And you can’t just say, “Vanderbilt is a fraud. She’s not related to Anderson Cooper and her background isn’t what she claims” without expecting the followup question, “Well, who is she?”.
Hannan may have been able to stall the investor for a while but the court system? It was all going to come out anyway and it’s her own fault for telling a bunch of lies while taking money from people.
We don’t know if she chose the name Vanderbilt because she was planning to commit fraud or if she chose the name because she liked it and only later decided to capitalize on it. But either way it’s not fair to expect someone else to be complicit by staying quiet about how she came it.
How about, “I’m an investigative journalist looking into Dr.V’s credentials. It would be inappropriate for me tell to you more since my investigation is not complete and she has yet to defend herself. But I’m curious why you, as an investor, feel comfortable believing that Dr. V is everything she says she is?”
Let’s say the investor was mentally unstable and violent. And let’s say Dr. V actually was 100% who she said she was, despite all the facts that Hannan thought he had uncovered. Suddenly the headline isn’t that Dr. V the fraudster transexual commits suicide, but it’s crazy investor murders an innocent inventor. A journalist shouldn’t put himself in a situation where he can alter the course of events like this.
Yes, the investor could have taken revenge on Dr. V after reading the story in the paper. But at least at the point, the facts would been double and triple-checked and the investor could see for himself what Dr. V’s defense (or lack thereof) was. And at least at the point, the journalist could not be accused of throwing gasoline on an already fiery situation. For all we know it was the investor who let Dr. V know that her biological gender had been exposed, literally pulling the trigger that made the story so juicy it was deemed worthy of publication.
To me, it’s like if an investigative journalist uncovered evidence that President Obama was having an affair. Would he blab to Sasha and Malia about it before wrapping up the investigation and reporting it to the public? Would he tell Michelle? I don’t think either of those would be appropriate, but admittedly I don’t have a background in journalism to know if it’s unethical.
I’m not conflating anything. You are treating everything as being disconnected. You are failing to think things through.
Why would the company need to know that information? The purpose of information it to make choices. What choice can they make? What good does it do the company to know that she is transgendered? What can they do with this information?
Their choices are treat her the same as if she wasn’t transgendered, or treat her differently. Treating her differently because of her transgendered status would be bigotry.
That’s the weak link in the chain. Once you get there, the whole thing breaks off. It thus becomes wrong for them to want to know about her transgender status. Their right to know falls apart because there’s nothing they can do about it. The very fact of knowing makes them worse off than they would be not knowing, because now they have to go out of their way to prove that everything they do has nothing to do with her transgender status.
And while not putting someone in a burqa on a kosher cookbook might be reasonable, that is not analogous to this situation. The reason you wouldn’t do that is not because of bigotry, but because it would be misleading about what is in your cookbook. That’s why you are allowed to discriminate in that situation–to avoid misleading people. That does not apply in this situation. The fact that this club was created by a trans woman does not in any way change the value of the product.
I’m not sure what to do with your ideas about Gibson and Cruise and their religious affiliations. But, yes, I would argue that if any company refused to business with them solely due to their religious beliefs, they would be wrong, too. Cruise’s belief in thetans or Gibson’s belief in God and the virgin Mary should be irrelevant. Now, of course, Gibson’s antisemitism and Cruise’s monetary contributions to what is practically a terrorist organization are fair game. Those are not the same thing as their religious beliefs.
At the individual level, it’s just a matter of not supporting things you don’t believe in. In that analogy, Mr. Vanderbilt’s contributions to LGBT organizations might be relevant, but not her actual status as a trans woman. That status is irrelevant to them, because it’s not something they need to know, as the only thing they can do about it is to discriminate against her.
The only way it isn’t irrelevant is if they are an immoral company. And Marley was clearly making an argument from morality. The information SHOULD BE irrelevant to them.
I’m going to have to disagree. If it was just a matter of covering up her gender situation - if there was no criminality involved, she was just a person who designed a golf club - I could see fudging the question. But when she committed fraud I don’t see that it’s inappropriate of the journalist to reveal that or or how he came to find out. In fact, I think it would have been inappropriate of him to cover for her (and possibly would even make him an accessory by doing so. I would even go so far as to say that I think it was entirely inappropriate for Vanderbilt to expect him to cover for her.
I’m not sure that I even believe that journalists have ethics, but in so far as they do, they’re not priests or doctors and they’re not obligated to look the other way when they uncover evidence of a crime. In your analogy about Obama having an affair - there’s nothing criminal about that. On the other hand, if a journalist discovered that Obama was gay and had, I don’t know, shipped someone off to Gitmo to hide the secret - I would not expect a reporter to sit on that news on that off chance that reveling Obama’s sexual identity might expose him to gay bashing.
Wow, I totally missed a whole section of your argument. It might take longer than five minutes to cover, so here’s a new post.
You seriously are making the argument that something is okay if it affects business? Okay, then it’s perfectly okay for Ms. Vanderbilt to con people because that helps her business.
Oh, wait, that’s stupid. Whether something “hurts your marketability” has little to do with whether it is acceptable or not. That’s why money had nothing to do with my previous post. The relevance money has is that greed often motivates you to do things that would otherwise be not acceptable.
Outing a minority is wrong for the very simple reason that it hurts that person. The only way to overcome that is if there’s a greater good. And making money is definitely not some greater good.
As for Haggard: that’s where we get into what I covered earlier. His homosexuality, at least in regards to acting upon it, affect the product. He is a preacher who is, by association, teaching that homosexuality is wrong, all the while doing it himself. To put it in your terms, as I did in the previous post, his homosexuality directly affects the value of his product. Thus it is relevant, rather that irrelevant.
The fact that some people are bigots does not make something relevant in and of itself. Yes, not knowing may cost you money, but you don’t have an inherent right to not lose money. For some reason, you seem to think that the right to make money is a fundamental right. And the right to not be discriminated against for something you can’t control overrides the non-existent right to have perfect market information so that you can make money.
Also, I don’t really consider doing business with someone to have to do with the freedom of association. Two parties doing business with each other are still two separate parties, and have not joined a group. And while each party has the right not to be given false information, they do not have the right to all information that affects marketability.
By that logic, it would be okay to break into people’s homes to gather information before making a deal.
That would be because her nationality was part of the con. The argument pro-trans people are making is that her gender was not part of the con, that Ms. Vanderbilt, despite being a con artist, was truly a trans woman.
I already conceded that, if you assume that her gender was just part of the con, then it is acceptable. And that is a mistake someone might make who doesn’t know anything about transgender issues, someone who doesn’t know how difficult it is to live as a gender that is not your own.
To someone who does know, the fact that she legally changed her name is a pretty big sign that she is trans. The fact that she maintained the ruse instead of taking off with the money (something mentioned in the article) is a sign. In fact, lots of deep cover trans people make up an entire life for themselves. To do that successfully for that long is a pretty big sign.
Now, of course, it remains possible that it was all part of the con, but to someone familiar with trans issues, the likelihood is lower. She behaved more like a trans person with a fake history than like a con artist. While what she said in service of her product is a scam, and the rest of her history is all entangled, her gender is not connected. It is the one thing we can be fairly certain is not a part of the con.
And thus the issue becomes solely about whether it is okay to out a trans person, or any other minority, who feels so discriminated against that they had to change their identity. The answer for that is no, and I’ve yet to see an argument otherwise, once the scam is eliminated from consideration. All the arguments are either “it’s okay because it is part of the scam”, the disproven (in this very thread) “It’s impossible to reveal the scam without revealing her trans status,” or the stupid “She’s a con artist so the regular rules don’t apply.”
Like I’ve said, the only argument that allows her to be outed is that her gender was part of the scam. I don’t think so, but at least that is arguable. And because you can reveal the scam without revealing her trans status and risk outing a trans person, that’s what you should do. Because, ultimately, whether it is part of the scam or not, the gender of the scientist who created this club is irrelevant.
Seems to me that it makes sense for them to be discrete with what they know until they are ready to go public. I can think of a lot of really bad scenarios that could result from a journalist blabbing off at the mouth prematurely. And conveniently, most of those scenarios profit the journalist by generating more drama.
Like, as I asked before, what if Dr. V. had actually been innocent? Hannan could have done a crappy job at investigating her background and overlooked crucial information. Before a story is published, there is some CYA fact-checking involved. An editor (and possibly lawyers) will noticing any glaring holes and ask about them. Any loose ends presumably get tied up before something ends up at the presses. But by going directly to the investor with his findings, Hannan bypassed this verification process. That doesn’t seem right to me.
I wouldn’t expect him to sit on this information either. But I also wouldn’t expect him to dish with the First Lady over cheese cake about it, like he’s her best friend. Not until the story was out for public consumption and the President had a chance to present his side to the story.
Is “She’s transgender” really an essential part of the answer to that question? Because I’m not seeing how that’s the sort of thing an investor has the right to know. Before discovering that Dr. V was transgender, Hannan had already found evidence that she wasn’t working in DC at the time she’d claimed and that no one named Essay Anne Vanderbilt had graduated from MIT, the University of Pennyslvania, or Wharton.
As for the Vanderbilt connection, I went to school with a guy whose last name was Rockefeller but who was no relation to the famous and wealthy Rockefellers. As it happens, he was also gay. If this Mr. Rockefeller were to go into the closet, become a con artist, and start making bogus claims about his “family connections”, it seems like it would be pretty easy to expose him as a fraud just by pulling up information about the family tree of the famous Rockefellers. There’d be no need to add “Oh yeah, and he’s also a homosexual!”
A lot of things might come out in a trial, but Dr. V wasn’t on trial and a journalist is not a prosecuting attorney.
They can not make her name and story the face of the company. The reality is that people knowing her history would (rightfully or not) affect sales. Perhaps they would have chosen to call it something else. Either way, your side can’t have it both ways. You can’t argue that her transgendered status makes her especially deserving of protection because she is a minority, and because she might be more likely to commit suicide, etc., then claim all of that is immaterial to those who have invested in her. If you are going to put yourself out there as a brand, you are under more scrutiny.
Why is it bigotry? Is it bigotry if I decide not to date someone because they are a Scientologist? What about if decide not to buy a Chik-fil-a because I think they are too religious? Why can’t it just be about the me deciding it’s a less advantageous business decision? Just like I might not want to donate to Anthony Weiner after knowing he can’t keep his junk in his pants.
They can not invest. Or they can change their marketing strategy. Or they can embrace it and sell it at LGBTQ conventions or something. It’s their call. The point is that it’s relevant given the way they marketed the club.
Let’s just use a less controversial analogue. If I am marketing a weight loss drink, is it relevant if my pitchman has had multiple weight loss surgeries and is on steroids? What about if I am opening a restaurant, and my partner has a heroin problem?
What do you mean “allowed to discriminate”? That makes no sense. And your rationale is complete bullshit. There is no reason a woman in a burqa would have any less ability to make good kosher food, nor would people be so utterly confused that they couldn’t read the title and reviews.
It does because the “value” of these products is the ability to sell the consumer an inspiring story. Her story is likely to be viewed as less compelling if her true story (in its entirety) were known.
Do you have a problem following basic logic?
It certainly does when that person IS the brand. Just as it’s probably not not legal to not hire someone because they are handicapped, it’s perfectly understandable to not hire handicapped people to advertise my fitness clothing.
Why do you think it affect his product?
No, you have a right to know all pertinent information about your business partners.
Why would it be okay to break the law to gather information?
At best that’s arguable. I don’t think a lot of people agree with this.
I hadn’t read it. And I think it omits too much information and wouldn’t work if you didn’t already know the full story. I’m sorry, but it omits too much factual documentation of what Vanderbilt was doing in the past.
I’d tweak this a little to say he shouldn’t have implied it. I don’t think he did so intentionally, but still.
I don’t think it would have been appropriate to speculate like that.
I’m not sure guilt is what we need here. Reflection, sure - and he does reflect at the end of the story. But we don’t know what role the article played in Vanderbilt’s suicide and past a certain point it just becomes narcissistic for Hannan to assume his story was responsible. Even if the story was the catalyst, her fraud made that possible.
The caution being “don’t defraud people?”
No, that’s not what I’m arguing. I am arguing that brickbacon is taking disclosure laws to a ludicrous extent. I don’t think it’s material or anything she was obliged to tell her investors.
That’s too vague to get a useful answer, and anyway it strongly implies that she’s a fraud, which you’re saying he shouldn’t have said. In that situation a reporter would have to be more specific: he could say he uncovered evidence that Vanderbilt never worked on the stealth bomber and that she didn’t have engineering degrees from Ivy League schools. That’s more than enough without getting into the TG thing.
That’s not true. It would be hard to look into any potential fraud if that were the case. The problem here is that he thoughtlessly outed her when it wasn’t relevant. It’s not that he inserted himself into the story or that he hadn’t marshaled all the facts- the information was solid and was accurate.
There’s no reason to think so. The investor didn’t seem to care.
Telling the children at any stage would be stupid. I’m not sure if it would be necessary to ask Michelle for comment on the initial reporting, but you would at least tell the president what you were going to report.
All the debate and hair-splitting aside, the issue seems simple to me.
Even the author of the article never claims that her transgender status was part of the con. But he did nonetheless highlight it fairly significantly, thus making an unrelated medical issue part of “the story.” Why was that? Because he wanted to add the salaciousness of “tranny alert!” to the article. I’m certain the editor, thinking “wow, we’ll get 10 times the page hits,” either consciously or unconsciously wanted to highlight the transgender aspect.
What if they had investigated a cisgender woman and published “while digging into the past of Ms. Smith, I discovered that she had had at least 4 abortions that could be proven, and was treated for syphilis twice.” Who is going to argue that that information should have been included in an article about a con woman and golf clubs? Is someone honestly going to make and argument that “the investors” “need” to know that? I suppose one can make a rather facetious argument that the investors should even know the cholesterol level of the CEO, in case he or she is at risk of heart disease and sudden death…but let’s try to pretend for a minute like we’re in the real world of business and investing and not arguing on a message board.
Her gender was not part of the con. In fact, given the pervasive phallocentricism of science and engineering (something I’ve personally seen and worked in from both sides, I might add), while it might interest some investors or golfers that “a smart dame” invented a golf club, I’ll wager that the inventor being a woman was more of a turn-off than a turn-on when it came to marketing the club.
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.
the language of the article seems just a bit too breathlessly scandal-mongering than clueless
page hits drive the net and editors and writers feel under a lot of pressure to grab those eyes, and sometimes there is a little bit of a spinning which goes on to get those hits.
Me and my people are still considered enough of a joke, enough of a sideshow such that it’s very convenient and easy to poke fun at us. All I have to do to remind myself of that is every day, when I scour the net for news articles for my own advocacy sites, to read the comments on articles. In most mainstream media they tend to run 50%+ “these godless freaks need to be finished off” and 25%+ “OMG those poor deluded psychopaths.”
Some people choose to be completely ignorant about the status of civil rights of transgender people and the way in which the general public views us. Me and my people are about at the level of the 1940’s or 1950’s relative to African Americans. Even some of my own people just. don’t. get it, so I certainly can’t expect the average American ignoramus to do so.
That doesn’t seem clueless to me. It seems like a deliberate attempt to shock or titillate the reader with the “chilling” revelation that Dr. V was transsexual. (I couldn’t help imagining Hannan dropping the phone and running to the bathroom to throw up, like in The Crying Game.) The editor acknowledges that including this line was a mistake, because while Hannan’s intent was supposedly just “Jesus, this story is getting stranger?” it sure comes across like “Ew, gross, she used to be a man?” And frankly, I have a difficult time believing that some other unexpected but non-criminal revelation about Dr. V’s private life would have been described in a similar manner. Heck, there are plenty of crimes (e.g. drug use) that I don’t think would have merited “a chill actually ran up my spine”.