By A longtime Seattle Times sports columnist has resigned after the newspaper refused to publish a column arguing that supporting separate sports for biological women does not make someone a bigot.
Matt Calkins, who spent 11 years at the newspaper, announced his resignation Thursday, saying the decision was entirely his own. The final straw, he said, was the paper’s refusal to run a column built around two female student athletes who objected to competing against biological males.
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
“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 competing against biological males,” Calkins wrote.
“It was one of several pieces of mine that had been spiked, and I no longer felt like I could properly do my job as a columnist. I lay out the situation in greater detail in the link below, but I want to say that I enjoyed my time with the paper, find the talent there to be immense, and have no animosity toward anyone who works there. It was just time for a change.”
The rejected column grew out of a rally supporting Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham before a July game against the Seattle Storm, according to Fox News. Cunningham had drawn national attention after saying she wanted to “protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” She later called her position “kind of common sense” and insisted that disagreement over women’s sports should not be confused with hatred toward transgender people.
Calkins interviewed 16-year-old Ahnaleigh Wilson and another female student athlete, Frances Staudt. Wilson had attended the Seattle rally carrying a sign thanking Cunningham for speaking up for girls. Calkins’s resulting column was titled, “Agreeing with Sophie Cunningham’s stance doesn’t make you transphobic.”
According to Calkins, he submitted the piece to his editor on July 31. It then spent days being reviewed by multiple editors before he was informed that the newspaper would not publish it. Calkins said he was told that he should have alerted editors about the column beforehand, an explanation he did not find convincing. He resigned shortly afterward.
Calkins eventually published the piece himself on Substack.
The column itself was hardly a fire-breathing political manifesto. It argued that people can respect transgender Americans while believing that biological differences matter in competitive athletics. Wilson told Calkins, “I don’t hate trans people and I have nothing against them. I just think that girls should have their own sports.”
Nor is that position somewhere on the political fringe. A 2025 Gallup poll found that 69 percent of Americans believed transgender athletes should compete on teams corresponding to their birth sex. Even among Democrats, 41 percent took that position.
The debate is particularly relevant in Washington, where voters will decide in November whether to approve Initiative IL26-638, which would prohibit biologically male students from competing in certain female school sports and require health-care providers to verify biological sex for students participating on female teams.
The issue has also moved well beyond the realm of conservative politics. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Idaho and West Virginia laws limiting girls’ and women’s school sports to biological females, ruling 6-3 that the restrictions did not violate either the Constitution or Title IX.
But Calkins said the Cunningham piece was only the latest column the Seattle Times refused to publish.
Another challenged the claim that the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team had been the victim of discrimination in its highly publicized equal-pay dispute. A second dealt broadly with cancel culture in sports. A third, written in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, highlighted longtime Rainier Beach basketball coach Mike Bethea, a black man who urged Americans not to stereotype police officers.
There is an obvious thread running through those subjects. Each departed, in one way or another, from the fashionable position of the moment.
For Calkins, that eventually raised a basic question about what a columnist is supposed to do.
“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.”
So he walked away from an 11-year career without knowing exactly what comes next.
“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.”
The Seattle Times had not publicly responded to Calkins’s resignation as of Thursday afternoon.
For a newspaper, that silence may be easier than explaining why a columnist was apparently free to offer opinions, until he offered the wrong ones.
[READ MORE: New York Times Loses Defamation Case]
