A longtime Seattle Times sports writer announced his resignation Thursday after he says the paper declined to publish one of his columns that broached the subject of transgender athletes in women’s sports.
In a lengthy post on X, Matt Calkins wrote that his decision to resign after 11 years “was not an easy one” before noting: “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.”
Calkins’ post also included a link to an essay on his Substack, where he elaborated on his claims in greater detail. The column in question, he explained, drew from interviews he conducted at a rally in support of WNBA star Sophie Cunningham, who has publicly spoken out against allowing trans athletes to participate in women’s sports.
While Calkins says he wanted to demonstrate “that supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic,” an editor informed him about six days after receiving his draft that “it wasn’t going to run because I didn’t tell him I was doing this in advance.”
Noting he “didn’t buy this reasoning,” Calkins said his response was to “resign on the spot,” and pointed to some of his other recently proposed columns ― all of which he said “challenged prevailing newsroom narratives and likely would have triggered the outrage mob” ― that had gone unpublished.
“I’ve always thought that it was a columnist’s duty to generate discussion on the most hot-button issues,” he wrote. “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.”
Calkins’ post includes a link to the full article, also published on Substack, which features the headline: “Agreeing with Sophie Cunningham’s stance doesn’t make you transphobic.”
“Some people saw bigotry. I saw bravery,” he writes at the start. “I saw a teenage girl speaking up on an issue that so many adults shy away from.”
Later, he adds: “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?”
A Seattle Times representative declined to comment to JS on personnel matters.
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Cunningham’s stance on trans athletes has been praised by President Donald Trump’s administration and made her a favorite among right-wing conservatives including podcaster Tomi Lahren and former swimmer Riley Gaines.
In an interview with ESPN published last month, however, Cunningham resisted the label of “MAGA Barbie” and said she’s “very much in the middle” politically.
“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that,’” she told the outlet. “I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
Elsewhere in his Substack essay, Calkins alluded to a quote from the 2005 film adaptation of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” adding that he was “scared shitless” of what the future might entail for both himself and his profession.
“The mob is frightening and does not forget,” he wrote. “Lots of seemingly brave souls have submitted once activists got their hooks in them.”