I put up last night's post in what was little more than a fit of rage, and it was less coherent than the subject deserved. I'm going to try and unpack my thoughts a little here. If you care, awesome. If not, my readership is unchanged.
For those who don't want to read the articles in the links, here's the short summation. Caleb Hannan wrote an article for Grantland.com about a putter- a golf club. Let's start with that. This story started with a golf club. It's also about the woman who invented it, a physicist by the name of Essay Anne Vanderbilt. While verifying her credentials as a physicist, he discovered that she was a fraud- no doctorate, no MBA, no education that would lend credence to her sales pitch that the putter was a scientific breakthrough. She was a struggling mechanic who, by all accounts, was impossible to work with. This part is good reporting. Not anything I would care about, but hey, it ruined a con artist's life and would give boring old dudes something to joke about on the golf course. But that wasn't what made this a big deal. Hannan chose to lump something else in with those fraudulent credentials: Essay Anne Vanderbilt was born a man. In pursuing this angle on the story, Vanderbilt's correspondence with Hannan goes from distant but helpful, to furious and threatening, to pleading with him not to out her, offering proof of her nonexistent degrees in exchange for a NDA on her past. Hannan refused. On October 18th of last year, Essay Anne Vanderbilt killed herself.
Christina Kahrl, a trans woman who writes about baseball (very well) for ESPN.com, was brought in to write a critique of the piece. Some of what she said should be obvious to anyone with the slightest bit of empathy. Much of the story was not information Hannan had any right to make public. The responsible thing to do would have been to push her about her fraudulent credentials while assuring her that her gender identity, as it was not pertinent to the story, would be off limits. Trans people kill themselves at a rate 26 times higher than that of the population as a whole. Some estimates have the trans suicide rate at 41%. Four. One. Violence against trans people remains an under-reported and tragic phenomenon. None of this was news to me, but it probably was for some. I really only learned one thing: the idea of a "deep stealth" transperson. That's someone who cuts oneself off from his or her previous life completely in order to start a new life as a new gender as Essay Anne Vanderbilt did. It was once second only to repression as the most recommended way of dealing with gender dysphoria. I can't imagine anything more horrifying.
Reacting to the blowback, Grantland Editor-In-Chief Bill Simmons wrote an open letter. This is where I went from sad to angry. Bill's like Jon Stewart, or the fine folks who make The Simpsons, or Green Day. He's been a part of my pop culture experience for half my life. I've read his columns since he was ESPN.com's Boston Sports Guy. I've read his books, "The Book of Basketball" and "Now I Can Die In Peace". I find him knowledgeable, persuasive, goofy, occasionally insufferable- all the things you want from a good columnist. To Bill's credit, he takes responsibility for running the story and admits several mistakes, but so much of what he says is completely culturally tone-deaf. It makes me think he doesn't really know the implications of taking that responsibility. Here are some of the things he said that made me want to breathe fire.
"On Wednesday morning, we posted a well-written feature by Caleb Hannan about an inventor named Essay Anne Vanderbilt, a.k.a. “Dr. V.” "
(When your subject kills herself, who cares how good the writing was?)
"Caleb only interacted with her a handful of times. He never, at any time, threatened to out her on Grantland. "
(Except that's what happened after she died. I don't see how he needed to put words to an obvious implied threat. Would he be asking her and her family repeated pointed questions about her gender identity if he had no intention of writing about it? Get real.)
"For us, this had become a story about a writer falling into, for lack of a better phrase, a reporting abyss. The writer originally asked a simple question — So what’s up with this putter? — that evolved into something else entirely."
(Um, yeah. The guy who writes about a golf club is the one who fell into an abyss. Not the transwoman whose clearly tenuous grip on reality was shattered by a piece about a golf club that turned into... whatever you want to call what it turned into.)
"Not only did we feel terrible about what happened to Dr. V, we could never really know why it happened. Nor was there any way to find out."
(Really, Bill? You don't know? I have a guess.)
So in the end, all I have is anger at a cultural monolith I used to mindlessly consume, and a new respect for Christina Kahrl. The word "courageous" is passed around the LGBTQ community like a blunt at a 311 concert. I have a better word for her: Tough. She is a tough person to speak for those who need it. There are still plenty of people who troll the internet making it clear they think gender dysphoria and homosexuality are perversions and sicknesses but also a choice somehow, and it takes more toughness than I think I'll ever have to stand in that world and say, "bring it on".
I need something good to come out of this. I need to know I'm a better person for having given this thought. So here's my conclusion: Self-definition is something hetero-normative people don't even think about. They are the way they are and that's the way they should be. For LGBTQs, self-definition is an essential part of life. It is the heart of their rights as humans and too often we treat it like it should be a privilege. Be gay, but don't do it in front of me. Be a lesbian, but don't get married. Be bi, but only if you're a girl, because that's hot. Be trans, but don't go out in public looking like that. If you don't know what you are, quit navelgazing and find a nice person of the opposite gender. Get to work making the next generation of entitled morons who don't learn to think in shades of grey.
Grantland and I are broken up, but as I said in the previous post, Rany and Jonah can still hang out sometime. As for what it means for my blog, I have no clue. I want to tell you I plan on writing about these issues if and when they come up. I want to brag that I've never been afraid to ask questions about myself, the people I share this planet with, the tribal mentalities that turn people against each other to distract us from what's really going on. I want to believe I'm the kind of person who has something to say when it's obvious someone has been mistreated. And yet I've written thousands of words about American goddamn Idol and baseball. I've wasted so much time and I'm not getting it back.
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