Newspaper Columnist Quits After Editors Kill Story on a Teen Sophie Cunningham Fan Who Thanked Her for ‘Speaking Up for Girls’

The newspaper might be spineless, but the columnist wasn’t.

A veteran Seattle Times sports columnist is making headlines of his own after resigning from the newspaper over a column being spiked that took a sane approach to the issue of men playing women’s sports.

And he didn’t hold back.

Matt Calkins, who had been with The Seattle Times for 11 years, took to Substack on Thursday to announce that he’d left the newspaper and detail what sounds like a clear case of heavy-handed censorship in favor of one of the left’s most sacred cows: the current nonsensical controversy over the idea that men and boys who claim to identify as female should have a right to use their God-given physical superiority in direct competition with women and girls.

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

In a column he wrote, but the newspaper refused to publish, he made the unarguable point that women and girls standing up for the sanctity of women’s sports — from the WNBA’s ever-more-famous Sophie Cunningham to high schoolers just playing for fun — are not being hateful when they make their points.

They’re showing guts.

“Some people saw bigotry. I saw bravery,” Calkins began the column.

He went on to describe meeting female athletes outside Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena on July 28, when the WNBA’s Seattle Storm played Cunningham’s Indiana Fever. They were part of a rally supporting Cunningham. One carried a sign reading “Thank You Sophie For Speaking Up For Girls!”

Readers might remember the game as the venue where Seattle Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton disgraced herself, her sport, and the left in general by verbally attacking two teenage girls showing their support for Cunningham at courtside. (Calkins had interviewed one of the girls.)

Calkins then articulated the reasons it’s necessary for female athletes and women’s sports advocates to stand firm against the insanity of pretending that a man claiming to be a woman is physically no different from naturally smaller, weaker athletes who actually are women (no matter how well trained they are).

Longtime Seattle Times sports columnist Matt Calkins is walking away after 11 years, saying the paper refused to publish his column giving a voice to female athletes who oppose transgender athletes competing in women’s sports.

“I couldn’t do my job as a columnist because I feel… pic.twitter.com/kAKq618qQH

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 20, 2026

It’s a column filled with common sense, combined with compassion for those unfortunate enough to “feel trapped in the wrong body,” as Calkins put it. But it doesn’t shy away from the truth:

“By every measurable metric in sports — whether it be 100-meter times, vertical leaps, weightlifting, yards off the tee, etc. — the top males substantially outperform the top females.

“In short: 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.”

In his Substack report, Calkins described how he filed the column, then waited as it went through reviews by the newspaper’s top editors.

“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,” Calkins wrote. “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.”

No one who’s ever worked at a newspaper would buy that reasoning. But then, neither would anyone outside journalism who’s followed the “trans” debate since it burst into the national debate as it’s gone from a fringe issue a decade ago to one of the hottest battlefields in the country’s unending culture wars. (Thanks, Lia Thomas.)

So-called “trans rights” has been treated as religious certainty by the American left, along with “climate change” and “systemic racism.” Any voice of dissent from the leftist orthodoxy is viewed as heresy and treated as such by those with the power in the media, academia, and politics to stamp it out.

Calkins wrote that he’s had columns spiked before, when they didn’t match the leftist view of events:

“One was a piece questioning whether players for the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team were really the victims of discrimination in their equal-pay lawsuit. Another was a more general column on cancel culture in sports.

“The last, written shortly after George Floyd’s death, implored people to listen to state-champion basketball coach Mike Bethea — a black man urging the public not to stereotype cops. The common theme? All of these challenged prevailing newsroom narratives and likely would have triggered the outrage mob.”

The Seattle Times had not publicly responded to Calkins’ columns Thursday afternoon. According to HuffPost, a newspaper representative would not comment on “personnel matters.”

So the limp-wristed excuse that Calkins didn’t clear his subject matter in advance will have to stand for the moment, but there are really only two possibilities for the newspaper to kill a column by one of its star voices:

Either the newspaper’s top bosses despised the eminently sane points it made and squelched it in an irresponsible abuse of power, which would be unforgivable, or they feared the backlash that would ensue from injecting a note of reason into a debate that leftists can only argue on grounds of emotion, which would be even worse.

That kind of spinelessness in the face of political pressure is inexcusable in an institution that’s part of a profession that was considered so important by the Founders that they enshrined freedom of the press in the First Amendment to the Constitution they gave to posterity.

Either way, it’s a sad commentary on the state of journalism in the United States — and it’s just one more proof that the American public’s record-low level of trust in the establishment media is remarkably deserved. (In a just world, in fact, it would be lower to the point of being nonexistent.)

Spineless in Seattle? It appears so. And just about everywhere else in the American mainstream media today.

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