“After 11 years as a sports columnist at the Seattle Times, I have decided to resign,” he wrote in a post in X. “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.”
The dispute began after Calkins reported on supporters of Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham who had gathered outside a Seattle Storm game.
Cunningham had previously attracted attention after telling ESPN that she opposed biological males competing against girls — a position that has become one of the most contentious issues in American sports.
Rather than simply weighing in from behind his desk, Calkins interviewed people directly affected by the debate.
Among those he spoke with were two female student-athletes. He also interviewed a teenage girl who, according to Calkins, had been cursed at by the owner of the Seattle Storm.
The resulting column made a straightforward argument: Americans should be able to support separate male and female athletic categories without automatically being branded bigots.
Calkins wrote that “supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic.”
But readers of The Seattle Times never got the opportunity to see the finished piece in the newspaper.
According to Calkins, the column spent days moving through the editorial process before management finally decided it would not be published.
“I sent a draft after talking to my editor the morning of Friday, July 31, telling him there was no rush to run it,” Calkins wrote. “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.”
For Calkins, that explanation apparently did not add up.
After more than a decade at the paper, he resigned.
And according to his account, this was hardly the first time he had run into resistance when attempting to publish a column that challenged politically fashionable opinions.
Calkins recalled three previous pieces that were rejected by the newspaper, including one questioning claims of discrimination in the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team’s equal-pay battle.
Another addressed cancel culture in the sports world.
A third, written following George Floyd’s death, highlighted the perspective of championship basketball coach Mike Bethea, who urged Americans not to stereotype police officers.
“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,” he wrote. “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.”
That history appears to have made the latest rejection particularly significant.
For conservatives who have spent years arguing that ideological conformity has taken hold inside major American newsrooms, Calkins’ account will likely sound familiar.
The controversy also comes as the fight over women’s sports continues to expand far beyond professional athletics. Female athletes, parents, lawmakers, school officials and governing bodies have increasingly found themselves battling over whether eligibility should be determined by biological sex or gender identity.
Calkins’ resignation puts another issue at the center of that fight: whether journalists inside major news organizations are free to challenge their own newsroom’s prevailing assumptions.
The former Seattle Times columnist is now entering unfamiliar territory after walking away from the security of a job he held for more than a decade.
He acknowledged that the decision comes with substantial personal uncertainty.
But Calkins made clear that, from his perspective, accepting that uncertainty was better than continuing to work somewhere he believed his voice was being restricted.
“To be honest, I’m scared s–tless right now,” he wrote. “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.”
Whatever comes next for Calkins, his departure has transformed what might have been one unpublished sports column into a much larger story about journalism, editorial control and the boundaries of acceptable debate.
The Seattle Times may have declined to publish his argument.
Calkins decided he would rather leave than stop making it.
