Seattle Times Columnist Resigns After Paper Scrapped Trans Sports Column

Matt Calkins, a columnist for the sports section of The Seattle Times, said he had resigned this month after editors refused to publish a column he wrote about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports.

Mr. Calkins, 44, announced his resignation in a post Thursday on the newsletter platform Substack. He said in an interview with The New York Times that he had arrived at the decision after editors declined to publish a series of “against the grain” columns he wrote, including the one about transgender athletes. In it, he argued that supporting a ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports did not automatically make a person transphobic.

“When I take controversial stands that kind of go against the grain, spiked,” said Mr. Calkins, who had been a columnist at the newspaper for 11 years. “Anything else is fine.”

A spokeswoman for The Seattle Times declined to comment on Mr. Calkins’s resignation.

Mr. Calkins’s Substack post thrust what might normally be a routine newsroom disagreement into public view, tapping into a national debate about ingrained political bias at traditional media outlets.

His editors originally told him that there would be a delay with the column, which he filed in late July, according to email correspondence reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Calkins then received another email informing him that senior editors would discuss the column. After that, he said, an editor informed him that the column would not be published because he hadn’t cleared it with editors before writing it.

At that point, Mr. Calkins said, he informed his editor that he would resign. He posted the column on Substack.

Mr. Calkins said his editors had turned down other columns that he felt espoused views that were “to the right of how most of the newsroom feels.” One column, he said, questioned the validity of the equal-pay lawsuit brought by the U.S. women’s soccer team. Another was a column on so-called cancel culture in sports. Editors did publish one such column, he said, which criticized the decision to display a political flag at a Seattle Sounders soccer game.

“I’ve been at other papers where the process was a lot longer and we just kind of said: ‘There’s stuff in here that we want to get in. Let’s figure it out,’” Mr. Calkins said. “It wasn’t so much the case there.”

Mr. Calkins said he had decided to come forward because he didn’t believe that “fading quietly into the night is the way to go.”

“I felt like I owed something to the public to say why I’m leaving,” he said.