I was a sports columnist at the Seattle Times for 11 years. This is why I resign

[SVPete]

I was a sports columnist at the Seattle Times for 11 years. This is why I resigned

https://mattycee.substack.com/p/i-was-a-sports-columnist-at-the-seattle

Toward the end of last month, before the Seattle Storm hosted the Indiana Fever, I spoke to people attending a rally in support of Sophie Cunningham outside Climate Pledge Arena. The Fever guard had recently taken a stance against biological males competing in women’s/girls sports, and a few dozen folks showed up to express their gratitude for her position.

One of them was 16-year-old Ahnaleigh Wilson, who’d lost to a biological male in a track and field race in eighth grade and was holding a sign reading “Thank You Sophie for Speaking up for Girls!”

I didn’t know if I was going to write something at that point, but after she allegedly got cussed out by a Storm co-owner during the game, I felt like I had to weigh in.

One thing Wilson emphasized to me at the rally was that she wasn’t anti-trans. Another student-athlete named Frances Staudt — who said she’s endured daily verbal abuse after refusing to play against a biological boy in a basketball game — echoed Wilson’s sentiment.

So that was the thesis of my column (which you can read here) — that supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic, so let’s stop throwing those labels around.

I sent a draft after talking to my editor the morning of Friday, July 31, telling him there was no rush to run it. ... 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.

My response? To resign on the spot.

That may come off as an emotional decision, but it was exactly what I was prepared to do. This, after all, was one of several columns of mine that had been spiked at the Seattle Times.

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.

When activists scream, "Jump!", MSM-folk ask, "How high?" on the way up. And still fear not having jumped far and high enough.

[SVPete]

He Did What Was Right, Not What Was Easy

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2026/08/21/he-did-what-was-right-not-what-was-easy-n3818200

Not many people in journalism would resign from a plum job for any reason.
...
And it's particularly true when your job is to be a columnist, which is about as plum a job as one can get. Like me, people pay you to share your opinions. ...

Yet Matt Calkins chose to do so, and for all the right reasons: his newspaper censored him for writing about topics from a perspective that was considered unapproved by the fanatics in the newsroom.

Matt was a sports columnist for the Seattle Times, which gave him entrée onto the fields and into the locker rooms and access to the people who make all the big decisions in any industry that he loves, and he shares that love with about a third of the country, according to market research. Twenty percent of Americans check scores and read stories and columns about sports several times a day, which means Calkins was likely the most-read person at the paper.

Yet when we decided to write about fans who showed up to support Sophie Cunningham after she took a stand defending women and girls in sports set aside for them, his paper spiked the column after holding it back for days and having multiple layers of editors review it.
...
Calkins' column was not a screed in any way. Instead, it was intended to share with his readers that good people could oppose trans athletes being women's sports without being "transphobic." It didn't even argue that transgenderism is a mental illness that should be treated as such, or that trans people are at all a threat to non-trans women.

All he did was share that the young girls (who would be shouted at by the owner of the Seattle Storm in the most unladylike way that night) were not preaching hate, but speaking out for girls who felt threatened by having to compete against boys who are stronger than they are.

A DUer would recognize and characterize Calkins's "sin" easily: he normalized people Progs need to be seen as monsters, haters.

As an aside, a favorite sport of Mrs. SVPete's and mine is American Ninja Warrior. For all the shtick - a very thin veneer - the athletes are very balanced, strength, endurance, agility, and precision. The obstacles test all these, and leave no way to hide a weak point. Getting to my point, by the time competitors make it onto TV, they are all accomplished athletes. In that field men generally do better than women generally do. It's biology, not skill and willingness to work. In the first stage of the annual competition, there are a minimum number of slots for women set aside who will advance to the next stage. It is not unusual for more than the minimum number of women to advance. At the next couple of stages, the best of the best continue, and the best of the women, as far as I remember (I'm fallible), fall out before the very last stages. It's not lack of skill or willingness to work, it's just biology.