Freelance journalist Caleb Hannan’s Grantland feature on the reclusive inventor of a golf club, which I wrote about earlier this week, caused a dam to break online; the inventor he researched against her will, Essay Anne Vanderbilt, was a trans woman who had—allegedly—lied about her educational credentials. Despite a pledge on Hannan’s part to write only about the science of her golf club, Dr. V found herself threatened with exposure of her trans status, a history she had worked tirelessly to suppress. She killed herself three months before Hannan’s article about her went to press.

Now Grantland’s editor in chief, Bill Simmons, has apologised at some length, focusing chiefly on the editorial process that produced the ...