Matt Calkins walked away from The Seattle Times after editors refused to publish a column challenging biological males competing in women’s sports.
The longtime sports columnist announced his resignation after 11 years at the newspaper, saying the rejection of his column about Sophie Cunningham and two female student-athletes was the final straw.
“After 11 years as a sports columnist at the Seattle Times, I have decided to resign,” he wrote in a post in X. “It was entirely my choice, and it was not an easy one. The impetus was the Times declining to run a column I wrote from the perspective of two female student athletes who were opposed to competing against biological males.”
Matt Calkins explained in a Substack post that he interviewed fans who gathered outside a Seattle Storm game to support Cunningham. The Indiana Fever star made headlines after telling ESPN that she opposed biological males competing against girls.
Calkins also spoke with a teenage girl who was allegedly cursed at by the Storm’s owner.
His column argued that “supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic.”
Calkins said the draft went through several days of review before editors ultimately rejected it.
“I sent a draft after talking to my editor the morning of Friday, July 31, telling him there was no rush to run it,” Calkins wrote. “He told me later that day that he and others were looking at it, but that it wouldn’t be ready for Sunday’s paper. Monday night, I got an email saying that his boss was hoping to talk to the top two newsroom editors about it on Wednesday. No feedback had been given to me. Thursday afternoon, my editor informed me that it wasn’t going to run because I didn’t tell him I was doing this in advance. I didn’t buy this reasoning. If that were the case, the piece would have been killed on the spot, not passed through the hands of multiple editors over several days.”
His response was immediate.
“To resign on the spot,” he wrote.
Calkins said it was not the first time the newspaper had declined to run one of his columns on a politically sensitive subject.
“One was a piece questioning whether players for the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team were really the victims of discrimination in their equal-pay lawsuit,” he wrote. “Another was a more general column on cancel culture in sports. The last, written shortly after George Floyd’s death, implored people to listen to state-champion basketball coach Mike Bethea — a black man urging the public not to stereotype cops. The common theme? All of these challenged prevailing newsroom narratives and likely would have triggered the outrage mob.”
Matt Calkins acknowledged that quitting has left him facing an uncertain future, but said it was preferable to remaining at a newspaper where he felt muzzled.
“To be honest, I’m scared s–tless right now,” he wrote. “I have no idea how the next few months or years are going to play out. But that fear beats the indignity of being muzzled.”
