BS BULLETIN:
- Veteran sports columnist Matt Calkins resigned after 11 years at The Seattle Times, saying editors refused to publish his column featuring two female student-athletes who oppose transgender participation in girls’ sports.
- Calkins says this was not an isolated fight: several previous columns that challenged prevailing newsroom narratives were also spiked.
- The controversy lands as Washington voters prepare to decide a November ballot measure restricting transgender participation in female school sports.
Matt Calkins spent 11 years writing opinions for The Seattle Times.
Apparently the trouble began when he had one the paper didn’t particularly want to publish.
Calkins resigned Thursday after editors declined to run a column built around the experiences of two Washington female student-athletes who oppose transgender athletes competing in girls’ and women’s sports. The longtime sports columnist said the episode convinced him he could no longer do the job he had supposedly been hired to do: report, observe and express an opinion. “I didn’t feel like I could speak my mind,” Calkins said in a Seattle radio interview after quitting.
The rejected piece was hardly a flamethrower.
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
Calkins attended a July rally outside Climate Pledge Arena supporting Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who has publicly opposed transgender women competing in women’s sports. There, he interviewed 16-year-old runner Ahnaleigh Wilson, who said she had previously competed against a transgender athlete, and later spoke with Tumwater basketball player Frances Staudt, who had declined to compete in a game involving a transgender opponent.
His thesis was straightforward: people can believe female sports should remain separated by biological sex without necessarily hating transgender people. Calkins ultimately published the piece himself on Substack under the headline “Agreeing with Sophie Cunningham’s stance doesn’t make you transphobic.”
“There were no slurs hurled. No malice detected,” he wrote of Wilson’s participation at the rally.
According to Calkins, he submitted the column to his editors and then spent roughly six days watching it move through layers of review before being told it would not run. He said the explanation he received was that he had not notified editors beforehand that he planned to write it.
He didn’t buy that explanation. More importantly, he says it fit a pattern. Calkins later said other opinion columns had also been rejected when they strayed too far from what he perceived as the newsroom consensus, including pieces involving cancel culture, the U.S. women’s soccer equal-pay fight and assumptions about racial bias in policing after the death of George Floyd.
That made the latest rejection the breaking point. “I no longer felt like I could properly do my job as a columnist,” he wrote.
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… pic.twitter.com/2SKaLDK7xA
— Jackson Thompson (@JackThompsonFOX) August 20, 2026
The Seattle Times has not publicly offered a detailed response to Calkins’ account. In reporting Thursday, outlets said the newspaper either declined comment or had not responded to requests for one. So for now, the public version of the dispute comes largely from Calkins.
Wilson became part of a national controversy after alleging that Seattle Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton confronted her inside Climate Pledge Arena over her support for Cunningham. OutKick reported that the Storm subsequently apologized and that the WNBA fined Keaton and suspended her from five home games.
Meanwhile, Washington voters are preparing for a direct vote on essentially the same underlying question. Initiative IL26-638, scheduled for the November 3 ballot, would require schools to prohibit students the measure defines as biologically male from participating in certain athletic competitions designated for female students. It would also require healthcare-provider verification of biological sex for affected participants.
Supporters call the measure a matter of fairness, safety and preserving opportunities created specifically for girls. Opponents argue it discriminates against transgender students and creates potentially intrusive eligibility requirements.
That is precisely why Calkins’ resignation matters beyond one newspaper. This is not an obscure theoretical debate. Washington voters are about to decide it themselves.
And one of the state’s biggest newspapers apparently decided its longtime sports columnist’s take on the issue was not fit to print.
MY QUICK TAKE
There is something almost beautifully backwards about hiring somebody as a columnist and then becoming nervous when he has a column.
A sports columnist is not supposed to be a human AP wire.
He is supposed to observe things, reach conclusions and occasionally write something that makes half the readers nod and the other half spill their coffee.
That is the job. Calkins’ great act of newsroom insurrection appears to have been saying: Maybe girls who don’t want to compete against biological males aren’t hateful monsters. Fetch the smelling salts.
How about, publish him. Then let readers decide. There used to be a name for that strange and exotic custom. Newspapers.
DBS WIRE SOURCES:
- OutKick — Seattle Times columnist resigns after paper allegedly refused to run ‘Save Women’s Sports’ column
- New York Post — Seattle Times writer quits over spiked Sophie Cunningham column
- MyNorthwest — ‘I didn’t feel like I could speak my mind’: Seattle Times columnist quits after paper kills Sophie Cunningham story
- Matt Calkins — I was a sports columnist at the Seattle Times for 11 years. This is why I resigned
- Matt Calkins — Agreeing with Sophie Cunningham’s stance doesn’t make you transphobic
- Washington Secretary of State — Initiative Measure IL26-638
