Just "she". No other pronoun is needed nor warranted.
The Grantland Dr. V Transgender Controversy
- Thread starter sirkickyass
- Start date
Just "she". No other pronoun is needed nor warranted.
Yeah, I got that now (see later post). I hadn't read the article or previous posts, so I wasn't sure the gender of the interviewee. Thanks tho!
I have mixed feelings about the entire incident.
Katie, I know that you know that I'm sympathetic to the transgender community and have no animus towards persons that are transgender. So please keep that in mind as I write this:
1. Investigations as to the person who invented the club were absolutely in-bounds. To the extent that the personal history of the inventor was put forward as a way to sell the club, that personal history was fair game to investigate.
2. That Dr. V had changed her name was relevant to the story. The reason Dr. V changed her name was not necessarily relevant to the story. I don't know that it's possible to write about the background of Dr. V without mentioning that history is difficult to find because of the name change. If you mention that Dr. V changed her name at some point without stating the reason why, the reader may draw their own conclusions (and they will probably conclude that Dr. V was a scam artist, but in any event none of the conclusions will be positive towards Dr. V). Certainly that appears to be a way to side-step the issue entirely. Reporters have a desire to report. Because the author knew the reason for the name change I'm not shocked he wrote why, and I think that impulse is defensible although unfortunate in this instance.
3. I think the social stigma of "outing" another person is close to being entirely eliminated. We're not there yet, but I think the language of "outing" is significantly undercut by the fact that the career and social repercussions of being outed as gay are becoming increasingly marginal. We're probably within a generation of it being near zero.
There are exceptions to this obviously. NPH appears to have a monopoly on being publicly gay but being accepted unquestioningly when he plays straight men in TV or film. Audiences appear to have no problem accepting publicly straight actors playing gay, or even transgender, so this is probably just a failure of imagination on the part of casting directors. But in any event, being outed as an actor may have detrimental effects on your ability to obtain straight romantic lead roles. This is just an example, but it's designed to illustrate how close I think we are getting to real acceptance for homosexuals. Using "outing" in this instance I think undercuts how scary coming out as transgender may be because the social stigma is basically a thousand times worse and knowledge is much worse about the subject. Because "outing" is so closely tied to gay experience I suspect that discussing it in terms of outing will lead many to believe this isn't that bad.
4. I do not believe that Caleb Hannan is, in any real way, responsible for the death of Dr. V.
5. I think we're playing the speculation game to large degree as to the extent that revealing Dr. V as transgender to an investor played a role in her death. To be honest, we're not entirely sure that she knew about it.
6. I suspect this incident, among those who are aware of it, is likely going to be net positive for transgender persons. I certainly can't remember any other incident on a non-niche forum that created such generally positive coverage related to transgender persons and that clearly articulated several issues in the community. That virtually every large web-magazine (Slate, MoJo, Gawker etc) covered it indicates that its visibility was relatively high.
7. I don't think it's fair to say that the article's quality is solely determined by its handling of this single subject. It's some of the most well-written reporting I've seen in the last few years. You could excise every reference to Dr. V being transgender and it would remain so. That's probably an argument for removal of the references but I'm saying that the references, taken alone, do not remove it from the camp of quality reporting.
8. Finally, I think the decision to leave the article up is the correct one.
In any event, it is certainly an interesting little cultural happening.
Yeah, but if Caleb did not start to "nose around" and stuck with Dr. V's original request to focus on the invention and not the inventor, I don't think she would have died.
Sure, it's not possible to say, "to what extent did that play a part", but the fact remained that had Caleb stuck with Dr. V's original request, we would not be here today.
Most of it is well written, until at the very end where he said "Writing a eulogy for a person who by all accounts despised you is an odd experience." To me that's Vindictive - to a person who is already dead, no less. Does she despise him? May be - but we'll never know that for a fact as Dr. V is now dead and cannot give us her side of the story. Notwithstanding that, he is no saint neither. He outed her to one of her investors and yet he never once mentioned this fact in his story. By not disclosing this information, to me it cannot be said that he gave a balanced account of what happened. Moreover, if he had "forgotten" to include this, it makes the reader wonders what other vital information he left out of the story.
Only to the extent of illustrating "What not to do, and how not to treat a fellow human being", which is the view of the Editor who dissected the original article in "What Grantland Got Wrong".
Darkwing Duck
Well-Known Member
If she hadn't defrauded the public, then she'd probably be alive, too. Not really a good argument.
The invention itself was claimed to be backed by a PhD from MIT. Can't focus on the invention without the inventor with that claim.
What's your reasoning for it being vindictive. No one that I've seen has remarked that the investor part wasn't a poor decision.
So the correct thing to do was to shelve the story and let her keep defrauding people?
And again, given how the product was advertised, the credentials and history of the inventor is fully fair game. As an investigative piece, noting that the inventor doesn't have the credentials isn't strong enough. Have to go further in depth. And just writing that the inventor has no history prior to a certain date leads to more questions.
Just a bad deal all around.
I think the correct thing to do was to approach her in a sensitive way and work out something whereby she has a say in how she would be "outed".
Going behind her back and out her to one of her investors like that wasn't right IMO. This is a sensitive subject and should have been treated in that way.
I got the feeling the article is about Caleb Hannan almost as much as it is about Dr. V and her hold club.
But obviously I'm not a golfer.
Sent from the JazzFanz app
But obviously I'm not a golfer.
Sent from the JazzFanz app
JimLes
Well-Known Member
How exactly is any of this fraud? The club either works or it doesn't. What difference does it make what kind of superpowers or whatever the creator claims? Don't they all? Axe bodyspray didn't lead to supermodels throwing themselves at me when I was in college. Is that fraud?
Joe Bagadonuts
Well-Known Member
Dr. V apparently made untrue claims about her background and therefore the science behind this club. That was a major selling point and it was clearly fraudulent. The Axe bodyspray stuff is done as a spoof and everyone knows it.
JimLes
Well-Known Member
The club either worked or it didn't. It has nothing to do with the background of the inventor.