Not many people in journalism would resign from a plum job for any reason.
There just aren't many jobs in journalism anymore, and that's even more true for jobs at the most important newspaper in one's state.
And it's particularly true when your job is to be a columnist, which is about as plum a job as one can get. Like me, people pay you to share your opinions. But unlike me and my colleagues, they do so with an expense account, longer deadlines, and far, far fewer pieces to write a week than I do in a single day.
Yet Matt Calkins chose to do so, and for all the right reasons: his newspaper censored him for writing about topics from a perspective that was considered unapproved by the fanatics in the newsroom.
It really stinks that mainstream media is so relentlessly biased against women and girls on the issue of female rights in sports that they won't even let our voices be heard. Shame on the @seattletimes.
— ♀️Jennifer Gingrich ✡️ (@fem_mb) August 20, 2026
Matt was a sports columnist for the Seattle Times, which gave him entrée onto the fields and into the locker rooms and access to the people who make all the big decisions in any industry that he loves, and he shares that love with about a third of the country, according to market research. Twenty percent of Americans check scores and read stories and columns about sports several times a day, which means Calkins was likely the most-read person at the paper.
Yet when we decided to write about fans who showed up to support Sophie Cunningham after she took a stand defending women and girls in sports set aside for them, his paper spiked the column after holding it back for days and having multiple layers of editors review it.
I really wanted the column to run. I didn’t think it would, but I felt obligated to try to get it in.
Toward the end of last month, before the Seattle Storm hosted the Indiana Fever, I spoke to people attending a rally in support of Sophie Cunningham outside Climate Pledge Arena. The Fever guard had recently taken a stance against biological males competing in women’s/girls sports, and a few dozen folks showed up to express their gratitude for her position.
One of them was 16-year-old Ahnaleigh Wilson, who’d lost to a biological male in a track and field race in eighth grade and was holding a sign reading “Thank You Sophie for Speaking up for Girls!”
I didn’t know if I was going to write something at that point, but after she allegedly got cussed out by a Storm co-owner during the game, I felt like I had to weigh in.
One thing Wilson emphasized to me at the rally was that she wasn’t anti-trans. Another student-athlete named Frances Staudt — who said she’s endured daily verbal abuse after refusing to play against a biological boy in a basketball game — echoed Wilson’s sentiment.
So that was the thesis of my column (which you can read here) — that supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic, so let’s stop throwing those labels around.
Calkins' column was not a screed in any way. Instead, it was intended to share with his readers that good people could oppose trans athletes being women's sports without being "transphobic." It didn't even argue that transgenderism is a mental illness that should be treated as such, or that trans people are at all a threat to non-trans women.
All he did was share that the young girls (who would be shouted at by the owner of the Seattle Storm in the most unladylike way that night) were not preaching hate, but speaking out for girls who felt threatened by having to compete against boys who are stronger than they are.
Two things can be true at once. You can show compassion for people who feel trapped in the wrong body while acknowledging they have a biological advantage. After all, why do we separate males and females in sports in the first place?
It’s not due to the potential awkwardness of physical contact. It’s because men have higher testosterone levels and different skeletal and muscular frames, which together produce significant performance advantages. This isn’t something I bring up at dinner parties, but it’s undeniable. By every measurable metric in sports — whether it be 100-meter times, vertical leaps, weightlifting, yards off the tee, etc. — the top males substantially outperform the top females.
In short: The separation is strictly for the sake of girls and women. So surely one can see why, to many, allowing biological males to compete against females undermines this division.
This is a position so anodyne that it is the minimum that 80 percent of Americans agree on; many of us hold much stronger views, such as that many of the men and boys who claim the status of women don't even believe it themselves, but are taking advantage of a loophole created by ideological fanatics. The number of people with genuine gender dysphoria is far smaller than those who claim to have it these days.
Sports writer Matt Calkins resigned from the Seattle Times after he claims they refused to print his column on girls and women standing up against trans athletes in their sports.
— Jackson Thompson (@JackThompsonFOX) August 20, 2026
"All they said was that, 'You didn't tell us you were doing this in advance, uh, so we can't run… pic.twitter.com/2SKaLDK7xA
Sports writer Matt Calkins resigned from the Seattle Times after he claims they refused to print his column on girls and women standing up against trans athletes in their sports.
"All they said was that, 'You didn't tell us you were doing this in advance, uh, so we can't run it.' But I didn't buy the excuse."
The paper had spiked several of Calkins' columns during his time as a columnist, and they did so to shut him up whenever he crossed the ideological line drawn by Leftists at the paper. They believe their job is to dictate the Overton Window, and Calkins was crossing their line, not society's line. He wasn't even crossing the line drawn by most liberals in America and venturing into "Right-wing" territory.
The Seattle Times did multiple glowing profile pieces on the male athlete who stole MULTIPLE state titles from girls. But run a column saying we shouldn’t call those girls’ transphobes for being disappointed? Nope! https://t.co/cKla8PSJRa pic.twitter.com/jCR5gUd4Ty
— Brandi Kruse (@BrandiKruse) August 21, 2026
He was merely saying things that most human beings agree on, and have forever: men and women are biologically different. Saying otherwise is only forbidden today because of the diktats of extremists. It's just that extremists dominate in the cultural elite these days.
I sent a draft after talking to my editor the morning of Friday, July 31, telling him there was no rush to run it. 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.
My response? To resign on the spot.
That may come off as an emotional decision, but it was exactly what I was prepared to do. This, after all, was one of several columns of mine that had been spiked at the Seattle Times.
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. 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.
I’ve always thought that it was a columnist’s duty to generate discussion on the most hot-button issues. To avoid such topics was to leave the reader shortchanged. I guess in the end, I just didn’t feel like I could do my job properly anymore.
The cultural elite has always functioned, or tried to function, as the hall monitors of our culture. There's nothing new about that, and that has caused more than a little bit of friction between the people inside that circle and the hoi polloi who tend to get annoyed at being lectured to.
But these days the hall monitors carry nightsticks to beat people into compliance, and often enough turn on each other to ensure that the Party Line is adhered to in the strictest way possible. As we have seen with the Jason Arday fiasco and its fallout, crossing that line can get you fired, as happened to Nathan Cofnas, who told the world that the Emperor had no clothes.
This is driven by a totalitarian impulse. People are punished for wrongthink.
Luckily for Calkins, he could choose the manner and timing of his departure, probably because his editors had the power to silence him until he chose to leave.
Lots of seemingly brave souls have submitted once activists got their hooks in them. If I had more people depending on me, perhaps I’d act similarly.
But in thinking about this decision, I kept going back to an Albus Dumbledore line: “We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.”
To be honest, I’m scared shitless right now. 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.
Calkins didn't have a parachute when he jumped out of the comfortable airplane he was riding in. He put it all on the line for a principle nobody knew he was being asked to violate. He could have stayed at the paper, and nobody would have been the wiser about his choice to buckle under.
Most people would have, especially in an industry where jobs like his are as rare as hen's teeth.
But he chose to do the right thing, and we should all wish him luck.
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