Sports Writer Resigns When Paper Rejected Column About Girls Not Wanting to Compete Against Boys

Sports Writer Resigns When Paper Rejected Column About Girls Not Wanting to Compete Against Boys

It’s always nice to see someone in the media with real principles.

After 11 years as a sports columnist at the Seattle Times, I have decided to resign. 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…

— Matt Calkins (@Matt_Calkins) August 20, 2026

From his Substack:

I was a sports columnist at the Seattle Times for 11 years. This is why I resigned

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.

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.

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