Seattle Times writer resigns in protest after article defending girls’ sports stifled

A longtime sports reporter has resigned after the newspaper he worked for published multiple articles supporting biological males competing in girls’ sports but rejected an article he wrote defending sex-segregated sports. Matt Calkins, a former sports writer for the Seattle Times, resigned from his post last week after his editors refused to run a series of interviews he had conducted with female athletes supporting keeping girls’ sports open only to biological females.

At a rally supporting Indiana Fever basketball player Sophie Cunningham and her defense of girls’ sports, Calkins spoke to several female athletes who had lost competitions against biological males. When the girls told him that they weren’t “anti-trans,” Calkins was intrigued.

“So that was the thesis of my column,” he wrote, “that supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic, so let’s stop throwing those labels around.”

In a Substack post, Calkins relayed that he submitted his story on July 31, after which it was reviewed by multiple editors, including “the top two newsroom editors.” Nearly a week later, however, the article was rejected for publication.

“[M]y 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,” Calkins reported. “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.”

Calkins recounted that at least two other sports-related pieces he had penned on hot-button topical issues had been “spiked” by the editorial team, leading him to announce that he “no longer felt like I could properly do my job as a columnist.”

“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,” he wrote. “I guess in the end, I just didn’t feel like I could do my job properly anymore.”

Last month, Cunningham voiced her opposition to allowing biological males to play in girls’ sports, shortly before the Indiana Fever faced the Seattle Storm in the Emerald City.

“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I'm like, 'I never once said that,'" the Indiana Fever guard said in an interview with ESPN. "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."

When Cunningham and her team showed up in Seattle, they were met with a rally expressing support for Cunningham’s position. Seattle Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton was subsequently suspended from attending the team’s games and was additionally fined “an undisclosed amount” after verbally abusing two teenage girls wearing “XX-XY” shirts in support of Cunningham and in defense of girls’ sports.

Calkins spoke to one of the two girls who has been accosted by Keaton, 16-year-old Ahnaleigh Wilson, who had lost an eighth-grade track and field competition to a biological male. “I don’t hate trans people and I have nothing against them,” Wilson told Calkins. “I just think that girls should have their own sports.”

“Two things can be true at once,” Calkins wrote, in the article the Seattle Times had refused to publish. “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?” he continued. “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.” 

Podcast host and commentator Brandi Kruse pointed out that the Seattle Times had previously published “multiple glowing profile pieces on the male athlete who stole MULTIPLE state titles from girls,” but that Calkins’ exhortation not to label girls like Wilson “transphobes” was a bridge too far for the paper.

When contacted by Zeale News, the Seattle Times had “no comment” on Calkins’s resignation or the decision to reject his article.