What Didn't Grantland Get Wrong?

Read Christina Kahrl’s response to the pathetic and troubling Grantland article published last week. At least Grantland now acknowledges how irresponsible it was in so many ways. It’s a small consolation in the face of how damaging and reckless the website was in publishing something so vile against “Dr. V” and the transgender community. The quick response to the backlash seems sincere and hopefully this will ultimately serve as an important teachable moment. 

An excerpt from Bill Simmons' mea culpa:

That mistake: Someone familiar with the transgender community should have read Caleb’s final draft. This never occurred to us. Nobody ever brought it up. Had we asked someone, they probably would have told us the following things …

1. You never mentioned that the transgender community has an abnormally high suicide rate. That’s a crucial piece — something that actually could have evolved into the third act and an entirely different ending. But you missed it completely.

2. You need to make it more clear within the piece that Caleb never, at any point, threatened to out her as he was doing his reporting.

3. You need to make it more clear that, before her death, you never internally discussed the possibility of outing her (and we didn’t).

4. You botched your pronoun structure in a couple of spots, which could easily be fixed by using GLAAD’s style guide for handling transgender language.

5. The phrase “chill ran down my spine” reads wrong. Either cut it or make it more clear what Caleb meant.

6. Caleb never should have outed Dr. V to one of her investors; you need to address that mistake either within the piece, as a footnote, or in a separate piece entirely.

(And maybe even … )

7. There’s a chance that Caleb’s reporting, even if it wasn’t threatening or malicious in any way, invariably affected Dr. V in ways that you never anticipated or understood. (Read Christina Kahrl’s thoughtful piece about Dr. V and our errors in judgment for more on that angle.)

To my infinite regret, we never asked anyone knowledgeable enough about transgender issues to help us either (a) improve the piece, or (b) realize that we shouldn’t run it. That’s our mistake — and really, my mistake, since it’s my site. So I want to apologize. I failed.

More importantly, I realized over the weekend that I didn’t know nearly enough about the transgender community – and neither does my staff. I read Caleb’s piece a certain way because of my own experiences in life. That’s not an acceptable excuse; it’s just what happened. And it’s what happened to Caleb, and everyone on my staff, and everyone who read/praised/shared that piece during that 56-hour stretch from Wednesday to Friday.