On Friday, Jan. 17, after two straight days of praise, Caleb Hannan began receiving death threats. His feature for Grantland, “Dr. V’s Magical Putter,” told the wild, careening story of his investigation of the “scientifically superior” Oracle GX1 putter, a reportorial assignment that quickly shifted into an effort to find out about the golf club’s enigmatic inventor, Essay Anne Vanderbilt. Between April and October 2013, Hannan established a correspondence with the woman known as Dr. V, only to be met with backlash and eventually outright threats from her as he attempted to verify her scientific bona fides. One lie after another, he unraveled her past: she had never attended MIT or the University of Pennsylvania, was never a government contractor on any stealth bomber projects, but had propped up these false credentials in order to give her fledgling putter company clout. Adding to the mystery was the fact that, prior to 2000, there was no evidence of Essay Anne Vanderbilt existing.
Prior to 2000, Dr. V had gone by her birth name, Stephen Krol. Vanderbilt was a transgender woman, information that Hannan passed on to one of Vanderbilt’s investors. Hannan also learned that Essay Anne Vanderbilt had attempted to kill herself in 2008; on Oct. 13, 2013, she was found dead with a plastic bag over her head and an empty pill bottle nearby. The writer did not dwell on this detail, ending his article one paragraph later.
I devoured this article on the day it came out, enthralled by the psychological thriller tone. The story was a tangle of twists and turns, done by a writer who went to such great lengths to follow them all. Hannan’s initial conceit—a writer and golf enthusiast searches for the perfect putter—gave way to something cuttingly personal, far more personal than he could have conceived of when initially reporting.
In that regard, “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” was so impressive that I never considered that Hannan might have gone too far.
After a weekend of weathering intense scrutiny, Grantland reached out to Christina Kahrl, a trans woman and sportswriter, to write a follow-up entitled “What Grantland Got Wrong.” She explained how insensitive and irresponsible it was to talk about Vanderbilt’s gender as part of a profile of her con, not to mention how unethical it was to out Vanderbilt at all, both to the investor while she was alive and to the reading public when she was dead. Her gender wasn’t just irrelevant; it was private. Kahrl also offered a very relevant statistic: per a study by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 41 percent of transgender people in the United States have attempted to take their own lives.
“Because of this screw-up, we owe it to the ruin wrought in its wake to talk about the desperate lives that most transgender Americans lead and the adaptive strategies they have to come up with while trying to deal with the massive rates of under- and unemployment from which the trans community generally suffers,” Kahrl wrote. “And we owe it to Essay Anne to understand how an attempt to escape those things became its own kind of trap, one Grantland had neither the right nor the responsibility to spring.”
On the same day Grantland published Kahrl’s rebuke, the site’s editor-in-chief Bill Simmons posted a letter explaining the in-house process leading to the publication of “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” and taking personal responsibility for Grantland’s collective editorial shortcomings. In doing so, he decried the death threats against Hannan, but not the criticism, vowing to embrace the error and be better.
“We just didn’t see the other side,” Simmons admitted. “We weren’t sophisticated enough. In the future, we will be sophisticated enough—at least on this particular topic. We’re never taking the Dr. V piece down from Grantland partly because we want people to learn from our experience. We weren’t educated, we failed to ask the right questions, we made mistakes, and we’re going to learn from them.”
Since Grantland’s apologies, I have read “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” a few more times. The article now runs with links to both Simmons’ and Kahrl’s responses before the original text, and it is now impossible to read Hannan’s work as anything but a writer’s reckless exploitation of his trans subject for more tantalizing material. Remembering how this writing had once thrilled me, I instead have been overcome with embarrassment, remorse, shame.
I’m not transphobic, but I am more ignorant than I had realized. I understand the importance of referring to someone by their preferred gender and accompanying pronouns, but I have been prone to slip-ups, even after I’ve been corrected. As an editor, I have attempted to work around “zes” and “hirs” because I thought they sounded more awkward than “he or she” would. I agree with the movement for single-use public restrooms at Wesleyan, but I have never considered getting involved.
I have been so distant from the trans* community that to me it has been little more than a handful of grammatical rules to me—and even in that sense, I should be more respectful. Only recently did I learn that though transgender is the preferred term of self-identification, the word transgendered is considered a slur. The line between right and wrong is so precarious that the past tense can deny someone agency in hir own identity.
On Friday, Dec. 13, Katie J.M. Baker made Wesleyan’s trans* controversy a national issue. Her article for Newsweek, “Wesleyan Slinks Away from Its Activist Roots,” gave me cause to talk about the debate outside the campus bubble. I talked to educated, sophisticated people who asked me what I meant by “trans*” and why the battle for single-use bathrooms was so important. Put in the position to explain, I became the closest thing available to an expert on the topic, simply by virtue of going to Wesleyan.
It took me over a month to figure out just how unacceptable that is. Even if you’re not an activist—and I’m certainly not—engagement with trans* issues is a necessity. The vocal minority can promote change, but unless the silent majority makes an active effort to educate itself about and accustom itself to the trans* community, protest will not beget progress, no matter how much those looking on want the protesters to succeed. Being adjacent to a controversy or a community is not equivalent to truly understanding it, and the cause is too serious and the risks too real to remain content with passing acknowledgment.