Seattle Times blew it by censoring Matt Calkins

BEND, Ore. - I’m guessing you’ve heard about the controversy involving Seattle Times sportswriter Matt Calkins quitting this week after the newspaper killed his column about trans-gender athletes competing against females.

Sophie Cunningham, who plays for the Indiana Fever of the WNBA, was in town in July for a game against the Seattle Storm. Cunningham has publicly stated her stance against biological males competing against females.

Two young fans who came to the game with signs supporting Cunningham were confronted and verbally slammed by one of the Storm’s owners, Celesta Keaton, who was subsequently punished and told by the WNBA that she could not attend the next five home games.

Matt posted his column on Substack. I saw nothing in it that was kill-worthy and agree with his premise that you can be against trans-athletes competing with females while NOT being anti-trans.

That seems logical enough, doesn’t it?

Apparently not to the higher-ups at the Times.

And with Calkins, it wasn’t the first time a column was killed - it’s happened several times before, and he’d just had enough, deciding to quit because he didn’t have the freedom to write the way he wanted to.

From what I’ve gathered on social media, most people support Calkins and respect him for what he did. I’d also say that a majority of people think trans-athletes who were biological males should not compete against females.

But even if you disrespect him for quitting and think it’s perfectly fine for trans-athletes to compete with females, that wasn’t the point of his column.

He merely wanted to point out that people can be two things - OK with boys who want to have a sex change but not OK with them competing against females.

Why the Times found that so egregious is hard to understand.

Everyone seems to be weighing in on this hot-button topic, and here I am, doing it too, thinking that I’m definitely out of my lane when it comes to this issue but I certainly know a thing or two about a columnist’s perspective since that was my job for seven years at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

My Go 2 Guy column ran from 2002 to 2009 when the newspaper folded. When it started, I asked my bosses what they wanted from me.

“Just be yourself,” they said.

Let’s start there. Matt was not allowed to be himself. The Times did not permit him to write about anything and everything he thought was worthy of a topic to spark discussion and interest from readers.

Keep in mind that I wrote during a different time. Things weren’t as politically correct and offensive in the first decade of the 21st century. And it helped that the P-I was more inclined to hang it out on the edge more than the Times.

At the P-I my writer’s license let me swerve all over the road. If I knocked over some pylons and occasionally spun out in the gravel, that was permissible.

I say this not because anyone ever told me as much, it’s just that unlike Calkins, I never had a column killed in seven years.

My main goal was to write columns you couldn’t get anywhere else. That’s it, I just wanted to go off on offbeat tangents, even crazy-ass tangents at times.

I was today’s baseball player as a columnist - swinging for the fences every single time, sometimes hitting tape-measure home runs, other times striking out in what amounted to terrible at-bats.

Here are some examples of columns that could have been killed but weren’t:

For a few years, I wrote an annual “Seattle’s Sexiest Sports Personalities” top 10 list for males and females.

I wrote about Amber the Sea Gal because she was hot.

I rated the looks of Mariners’ players wives in “the Mariners Players’ Wives’ Cookbook” in 2004 and distinctly remember that Joel Piniero’s wife was at the top of my list.

I also remember getting a call from Mariners vice president of media relations Randy Adamack after that one. Randy was the absolute best. I knew he didn’t want to call but had to because Jamie Moyer’s wife was livid.

I’m thinking she was probably mad about me having the gall to write about the wives’ attractiveness or maybe she was just angry that I didn’t rate her higher, I don’t know.

Even if the P-I was still around, the way times are now, I don’t think those columns would have been published in 2026.

And “The Drill” may have never come to life.

For a few years I wrote a Saturday column that started out as “The Two-Minute Drill,” featuring my college football and NFL predictions.

It somehow evolved into “The Drill,” my alter-ego, a fictionalized part of me who I wished I’d become instead of the boring responsible family man I’d turned into.

The Drill was a gambling, drinking and carousing fool, a loser of a human being that I got a kick out of anyway. He always seemed to be having more fun than I was, and the biggest thing we had in common was his love for the Cougs.

None of these things would have flown at the Times.

I talked to Matt earlier this week. He was simply calling me to see how things were going on Substack since he was thinking about doing it himself.

Someone on Twitter questioned whether Calkins was seeking attention by doing interviews after quitting, but I don’t think that’s the case. In our conversation he didn’t sound like he had ulterior motives in mind.

In fact, he doesn’t really have a Plan B - he’s just feeling things out at the moment; maybe he’ll still be a sportswriter, maybe he’ll get into a different line of work.

I like that he took a stand especially since he didn’t have an outrageous take as it was.

I’m not supporting Matt just because I’m a former sports columnist and we look out for each other.

Plus I’m not opposed to a newspaper censoring a columnist if he’s gone too far with what he’s written.

But in this case, Calkins didn’t do that. And he’s right - just because someone disagrees with athletes who are biological males competing with females doesn’t mean they’re against sex changes. And it’s all right to voice that opinion.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But everything’s wrong with what the Times did to Matt Calkins.

Thanks for reading and subscribing. Have a good Sunday.