Last week, Grantland, a sports and pop culture blog, published an investigative story on the inventor of a golf putter who was, irrelevantly, transgender. The author of the story, Caleb Hannan, exposed the inventor, known as Dr. V, for allegedly lying about her education and work experience. But that’s not where the story goes bad.
Shortly after Hannan emailed Dr. V saying he knew her secret, she killed herself. The story ran four months later. 
After some initial praise for Hannan’s investigative reporting, comments turned sour, arguing that Hannan had no right to out Dr. V on the personal                       matter of sexuality.
At first, I thought Hannan was doing his job, and like any good reporter he saw a story and reported it. But after assessing some of my own insensitivities, I realized Dr. V’s sexuality should not have been part of the story at all. 
Melanie Stapleton, president of Spectrum, the University’s LGBTQ organization, said in an email, “Seeing something as ridiculous as a golf article reinforcing negative stereotypes is sickening. We do have the right to freedom of speech, but that doesn’t mean we have the right to be free of basic human compassion.”
The rest of the country is starting to agree with her.
The federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled on Jan. 21 that juries cannot be discriminated against based on sexual orientation. 
At first, people fought to end race discrimination in juries and then moved on to gender discrimination. Now we are combating sexual orientation and gender identification discrimination. 
The federal court ruled that someone’s sexual orientation does not matter in a jury. So why should it matter in any other situation?
Sure, it was crucial to know that Dr. V was not actually a doctor at all and was lying about a majority of her past. But the story should have stopped there, especially after Dr. V made it known to Hannan she did not want a   personal side of the story to run. 
Dr. V was transgender. This shouldn’t be a factor in assessing her morals. A person’s gender identity is exactly that, his or her own. It was not Hannan’s place to out Dr. V, even in death. 
Taking everything into account, I don’t think Hannan  deserved the amount of criticism he received. Yes, he was ignorant. No, ignorance is not an excuse, but it is an unfortunate trait that many Americans are guilty of possessing. 
We are ignorant about one another because we don’t take the time to understand what we don’t know. We shy away from people in other cultures, claiming to not understand their way of life. We judge people who are in different social classes because we don’t understand their pasts. We are, collectively, an ignorant species. 
The disturbing part is that some people will live their entire lives comfortable in their blissful stupidity, never venturing outside their own bubbles of selfishness. That is where the real problem lies. 
And while Hannan and Grantland are each guilty of some of these things, they are not as guilty as the many people in this world who refuse to admit to their shortcomings.
I believe Hannan will not spend the rest of his days ignorant about the LGBTQ community. He has probably learned more in the last two weeks than he had in his entire life thus far.
With the stigma surrounding the transgender community brought into the light, it is up to the people to decide whether to educate themselves.
Ignorance is not an excuse. It is not a way of life either. 
Annette Sommers is an 18-year-old mass communication sophomore from Dublin, Calif.