A revelation about drug use wouldn’t have shed any light on what Vanderbilt was doing in her past and why Hannan could’t find a trace of her. You’d have to come up with a substitute related to her real, undisclosed past, and I think that any solution to that mystery would have been described that way. I agree that that line should have been written differently.
I am not sure I have said anything about “disclosure laws” whatever those may be.
Because in and of itself, it’s not a con. I think most reasonable people can agree on that.
I would bet that was part of it. However, a much larger part is that, assuming you accept his supposition that golf clubs are sold based on the story behind them, the story this woman told was not accurate in almost every sense.
I think that stuff certainly would have been relevant to the investors given they marketed this product based on her fable. That said, the two are not particularly analogous given the reporter found all this out while checking her background and educational credentials. It’s not like he was searching for stuff to smear her. I doubt that he would have as easily stumbled upon accounts of her having abortions. After he finds out she was born a man, he is kinda obligated to include it in his account of events if it’s going to be published.
Additionally, I think a lot of the outrage is just a complete disagreement on basic premises. I think most people would say she was born a man whereas I think you would argue she was always a woman. I think many on your side would argue she just got a major, but largely cosmetic procedure to correct a medical issue like someone getting a nose job, or liposuction. Not to say the surgeries are analogous, just that you think of it more so a righting a perceived problem instead changing your identity. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong. I just don’t think most people will every agree with that idea without reservations. I think this is the main source of the most vehement disagreement on this matter.
Along those lines, if you see the appeal of Dr. V’s story resting in part on her being a overqualified, female engineering genius who challenged the tired ideas of the old, white, male establishment, it makes sense to point out that she is none of those things. That is something that seems relevant to me if your are trying to sell a product based on that story.
This, again, is why I feel it’s relevant to investors if they are going to market the club the way they did. If they didn’t want to make her the face of this brand, then her background is less important. Hell, if she wasn’t the face of the brand, he educational background hardly matters. Even the reporters say outside scientists he consulted say the science was generally sound. She delivered a well-designed product, so if that is the only standard she is to be held to, none of this stuff matters. If she were just some engineer working at Ping or Calloway, her being born a man, or even being a Vanderbilt, would have zero relevance; just as it wouldn’t if she were a waitress, cashier, or dentist.
Once you connect the brand with the individual, much more careful vetting needs to occur. This is why politicians and celebrities are often chosen or not chosen based on all sorts of criteria ostensibly unrelated to the job. Do I care if my mechanic was born a woman or had multiple abortions? Not really. Do I care if a politician I am planning to work for and endorse was born a man or had multiple abortions? Yes, I do. Not because either of those things is inherently problematic. Just because I know it will impact the race.
To pick a less controversial example. There is a rapper named Rick Ross who likes to rap about selling drugs and generally being a criminal. A few years into a successful career, during which he sold millions of records, it came out that he used to be a prison guard rather than the drug dealing thug he portrayed himself as. Now let’s go back to the day that info hit the internet. If you were his manager, and you spent countless hours cultivating this image, don’t you think you should have been told about his true past?
Well, not if she was just an occasional pot smoker or something, but plenty of people with serious drug problems spend time on the streets or in prison. That’s the sort of thing an aspiring inventor might want to hide from investors.
But more to the point, before Hannan learned that Dr. V was transgender he already had good reason to believe that she had lied about her credentials and had pretty solid information about what she was doing shortly before she got into designing golf clubs. He had confirmed that no one named Essay Anne Vanderbilt had attended MIT or the University of Pennsylvania, and that in 2007 – at the same time she claimed to have been working for the government in DC – she was employed as a “vehicle service writer” in Arizona. The reason he couldn’t find much information about her from before that wasn’t because she was transgender per se, but because she’d changed her name.
I’m having difficulty thinking of any non-criminal substitute where this “chill up my spine” stuff wouldn’t have seemed ridiculous or incredibly insensitive. And it’s not like the fact that she was transgender actually disproved any of Dr. V’s claims about her credentials. While Dr. V was indeed lying, there’s nothing about being transgender that prevents one from being born into a wealthy family or attending MIT.
A lovely sentiment coming from one who demands civility.
The problem is this: there really was a “scandal” here because Vanderbilt was a liar and a fraud. If a person who wasn’t transgender had done the same exact things Vanderbilt did, you’d still have a scandal and a story. Outing her answers some questions about her background but doesn’t change the story that much to me.
I’m talking about required disclosures for businesses. You’ve said over and over again that this was material information that her investors had a right to know, and I don’t think it is.
Yes, it’s something they might want to hide. But it doesn’t explain why he couldn’t find a trace of her.
Right. And the name change is related to the con, so it’s fair to report it. To me it doesn’t become off-limits just because she’s transgender.
And the problem with reporting the story that way is this: confirming nobody named Essay Vanderbilt attended MIT/Penn is very different from confirming that Vanderbilt didn’t attend MIT and Penn. Who’s to say she didn’t change her name? What happens if Grantland reports that nobody with the name Essay Vanderbilt attended those schools and it turns out that Vanderbilt attended those schools under another name? I’m not even talking about any legal issues, it simply becomes a huge hole in the story. Of course the facts strongly suggested she didn’t go there, but they also raise the question ‘what was she doing, and if she wasn’t Essay Vanderbilt, who was she?’ The story is incomplete without that, and the question isn’t answered until we find out that she was Steven Krol.
Or you could look at it this way: if Hannan had never learned that she was transgender or who she was before she became Essay Vanderbilt, perhaps Grantland still could have done a story based on the fact that she was a mystery woman who, at least based on the available evidence, had made up an engineering background to help sell her putter. But once they found the truth they shouldn’t have kept it quiet. In journalism that’s a big deal.
Once they knew her name they could confirm that she hadn’t attended MIT and wasn’t related to the Vanderbilts. The difference between suggesting something (even strongly) and proving it is also a big one.
To you, maybe. But from what I can gather without the transexual and suicide angles it would not have been “interesting” enough to publish. Without them there was no “story.” That ignorance based chills up his spine aspect was banked on to be shared by the intended audience and to drive page views that faked credentials to get an apparently good product sold would not had driven.
The story could have said there had been a name change without mentioning the previous name or the gender change aspect and all facts pertinent to the fraud would have been included. It would have been a story that few would have talked about and it would not have been published. Breathless “SHE WAS REALLY A HE!” (No, not really.) “SUICIDE!” made it … “a story.”
usedtobe I read Una as having being very civil and if anything restrained. Civility does not require pretending that ignorance does not exist in front of you or that much of the American public is not completely clueless. I’ve also not read (could have missed it, I admit) Una demanding civility so much as demanding some basic rights for those like her to exist without having to suffer abuse, and requesting some understanding and compassion from those of us who are capable of that. Most here have read her posts in multiple threads, had our pre-existing ignorance substantially reduced, and have a bit more understanding than we did before. We are grateful for that. Some here have not. Most of America has not had similar opportunity to be so informed and many would not be interested in becoming so informed. That’s just the sad truth as many of us honestly see it. Do you seriously disagree?
Well, part of the problem I have with Hannan’s behavior is that he couldn’t keep quiet before the story was published. He outed her as transgender to one of her investors while still working on the story.
The way he describes this in his story also strikes me as pretty insensitive:
He sounds a bit disappointed that Phil Kenney didn’t have a “chill up his spine” response to the news that Dr. V was transgender. That Dr. V lied about her credentials is presented as an afterthought; the emphasis is on how “the woman…had once been a man”. Again, this doesn’t strike me as Hannan just being clueless about trans issues. This sounds like the words of someone who thinks that by living as a woman Dr. V was committing a deception at least as serious as lying to investors about her educational and professional qualifications.
I’ve said he shouldn’t have done that. There was no need for it and he had no business doing so.
I’ve also said that the “chill” line was a bad choice. But I think you’re reading too much into the word order. The surprise isn’t just that Kenney doesn’t care that Vanderbilt was transgender, it’s that he doesn’t seem to care that she lied about her credentials either.
Well, that’s not what Hannan wrote. He wrote that he was most surprised that Kinney was so calm about the revelation that Dr. V was transgender. And Hannan was not a SDMB poster dashing something off on his lunch break, he’s a journalist who worked on this story for a long time. He must have put some thought into his choice of words and phrasing. The way he chose to describe how he outed Dr. V to Kinney emphasizes how shocking Hannan felt it was that Dr. V was trans, even though Kinney himself didn’t actually seem to care much.
Now you’re not remembering what Hannan wrote very well. Here:
I helpfully bolded the first sentence, which is what your dialogue has been referring to. Note that Hannan uses two descriptors for Dr. V, both pre & post, um, versions(?): “the woman he thought was an aerospace engineer”, “a man, and a mechanic”. This indicates to me that Hannan did, in fact, choose his words with care, so that he was not focusing unduly on Dr. V’s trangender status.
Your characterization of Hannan’s writing and of what you perceive Kinney’s attitude to be don’t comport at all with my own reading of the article.
You’re reading a lot into the order of two words now.
And reading them incorrectly too; what Hannan wrote (as I quoted above) was “Maybe the most surprising thing about my conversation with Kinney was how calmly he took the news”. That’s a whole lot different than what Lamia wrote that Hannan wrote.
I don’t personally believe it was “those icky trannies!” thing. It reeks more of ignorance and something that was poorly handled from the beginning. I honestly do not think saying “he” to speak of Dr. V’s former life was done out of malice. Hannan seems very uneducated about transgenderism. (Is that a word?) Should he have outed her? I don’t know, but considering her past involved a lot of fraud, it’s inevitable it would’ve come up – but it could’ve been dealt with a hell of a lot more sensitively.
Or, a more cynical and perhaps even nastier reason for outing her – the story could probably sell better. As sick as that is, this is the kind of thing that would sell more copies.
I’m not sure “this person you’ve probably never heard of developed a hi-tech putter is TG and a fraud” would really draw more page views than “this person you’ve probably never heard of developed a hi-tech putter is a fraud.” Yes, a lot of people aren’t familiar with the transgender and some jerks think they’re freaks. But the attraction here is that this is such a strange story - a great putter, an odd and mysterious inventor, then fraud, then a suicide - not just the truth about Dr. V’s past.
Do you think that without that appeal to the “chill up the spine” that many who do not know better still have about ohmyatransexual and the that the article would have sold without it being the “strange story” with the chilling (oh my) reveal? The first line teaser, the “strange” of the “strange story” was not meant as that someone lied about credentials to sell and get seed money for what seems to be a pretty decent product, but the reveal that her gender somehow should be in airquotes. The story was rejected until the transexual angle and suicide were known. That’s its hook, not falsified credentials. The take is curious reporter digs and finds, Chinatown style, that things are not what they seem, an engineer woman is “really” a man who was a mechanic. Down to the threats … maybe not nose sliced but threats made and felt as noble reporter digs for truth and finds a sordid (ohmy again) mess.
The woman is dead. An intelligent and useful article could have been written after the fact, after the writer inserted himself into events and outed her gender history to her investor, that explored some issues that these events reasonably raise. Instead they went for selling it as purient interest.
I’m not the one focusing on two words. Hannan did the wrong thing again and again here. He was wrong to tell Kinney that Dr. V was transgender in the first place, and he was wrong to milk this revelation for cheap shock value. Hannan didn’t really need to mention that Dr. V was transgender in this section of the article at all. He’d already revealed this information to the reader and told us how spine-chilling he found it. But he makes a point of telling us that “before I told him about her past” Kinney had considered Dr. V to be an attractive woman, and of saying how surprising it was that Kinney took it calmly when he learned that pretty, miniskirt-wearing Dr. V “had once been a man”…and oh yeah, was a mechanic rather than an engineer.
Like I said: yes.
Because the story had no ending - there were doubts about Vanderbilt’s credentials, but that was about it - and there the whole thing is less interesting without knowing she committed suicide while Hannan was working on the piece.
You are, though. You keep saying he treated the “and a mechanic” part as an afterthought when it’s actually in the same sentence as the statement that she was born a man. Should he have dealt with this at all in this section of the story? No- because he shouldn’t have disclosed that information to Kenney in the first place. But the rest of it is just assuming the worst.
AFAIK, there are no disclosure laws that require principle investors to tell their fellow business partners about their background (as long as there weren’t laws broken). My issue was not about what the “law” should be. It’s that once she knows the plan is to market the club based on her story, I think she morally owes it to her partners to disclose all the relevant background info.
Probably, but why is that a knock on Grantland? Would reporting on Clinton’s perjury been as pervasive if he wasn’t lying about a blowjob? Drama sells. Given that the story isn’t written to denigrate trans people, I am not sure why Grantland’s desire to publish sensational stories is worth critiquing.
That’s a more than a bit of projecting. I think it’s just as likely the chill came from realizing his background research yielded nothing because he was essentially looking for someone who didn’t exist. Why do you assume this was a chill of revulsion instead of revelation, comprehension, or recognition? Now, I don’t want to make excuses for the guy as I don’t know him. But I don’t see how much else in the article supports this idea that he was so personally repulsed upon inferring his subject was born a man that he had some physical reaction. Especially given Grantland is not some backwater publication. They had several people read this who presumably know him, and if he were known to be a bigot, I think they would have edited this piece more at the very least. You need look no further than Bill Simmons’ own explantion of that line:
[QUOTE=Bill Simmons]
Suddenly, a line like “a chill ran down my spine” — which I had always interpreted as “Jesus, this story is getting stranger?” (Caleb’s intent, by the way) — now read like, “Ew, gross, she used to be a man?”
[/QUOTE]
Seems to also be backed by the initial reaction most people had given the article was up for over 2 days before people complained.
Impossible given that the info came out during the course of the investigation. Hiding something like is not something reporters do.
Of course the suicide made it a story; a full story that was worthy of being published. Why do you keep saying that like it’s a surprise. While I think they could have been more respectful given her death, not reporting on it is not an plausible option.
This is often how reportage works. You confirm facts with other principle actors involved.
Let me ask you this: why do you think lying about her credentials is a serious deception? Seems like you guys want to argue that she was essentially a contractor who fulfilled her duties by designing a good club. If that is the case, why does her education matter at all after the fact? Obviously it might have mattered beforehand, but if you think the primary duty she had to the investors was to produce a technically sound product, what does it matter?
Simmons’ account seems to indicate this is just factually incorrect. Caleb already knew about her being born a man when when article was initially rejected. They told him to keep reporting because there was no ending to the story given that Dr. V cut off all contact with him. The account seems to imply that she cut off contact after his conversation with Frische. In Simmons’ words:
[QUOTE=Bill Simmons]
We first reached the “Is it worth it?” point with Caleb’s piece in September, after Caleb turned in a rollicking draft that included a number of twists and turns. The story had no ending because Dr. V wouldn’t talk to him anymore. We never seriously considered running his piece, at least in that version’s form.
Our decision: Sorry, Caleb, you need to keep reporting this one. It’s not there.
You know what happened next: One last correspondence between Caleb and Dr. V in September, the one that included her threat and the “hate crime” accusation (both covered in the piece that eventually ran).
[/QUOTE]
That last correspondence was in response to an email he sent asking about all the info he found including the fact that she was born a man. My account is backed by the dates. Dr. V committed suicide in October, the article was rejected in September.
Care to retract your claim, or back it up with evidence?
Ah, OK. I thought you were saying it was something she would’ve been required to tell them. We disagree about the obligation but there’s not much else to say about that.
Fair enough. My apologies if my intent wasn’t clear.