According to his bio at The Seattle Times, the accomplishments of sports columnist Matt Calkins included getting a Seattle Seahawk to design his apartment and extracting a two-word quote from actor and former running back Marshawn Lynch.
He was also thrice named national sports columnist of the year, and his work was featured in the anthology “Best American Sports Writing.”
But none of these professional achievements put him in the national spotlight like a social media post did this week, when Calkins announced that he had resigned after his editors wouldn’t run a column he wrote about transgender athletes in women’s sports.
Some people light a match and blow up their careers. Calkins lit a match and created a new one.
With a one-paragraph post, Calkins became a hero of the political right, winning praise from Megyn Kelly, Michael Shellenberger, Riley Gaines, Andy Ngo and other conservatives who drive conversation on social media.
It was not unlike the way in which Bari Weiss became a superstar among conservatives virtually overnight when she shared her resignation letter from The New York Times in 2020.
There will likely be cynics who will say this move was calculated, even though Calkins walked away from a plum job at a time in which plum jobs in journalism are increasingly hard to come by. Moreover, being strongly associated with a political movement, especially the right, is uniquely disqualifying in mainstream journalism.
At issue was Calkins’ assertion that being against transgender athletes playing in women’s sports doesn’t make a person “transphobic,” as is frequently said by those who believe gender identity is what should matter in sports.
Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham has drawn fire for saying the same. “I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I’m like, ‘I never once said that,’” Cunningham told ESPN last month, adding, “I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sports who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
Calkins interviewed two young athletes who expressed support for Cunningham and then wrote a column decrying knee-jerk reactions that paint people who feel that way as being on the side of hate.
“This doesn’t mean that there aren’t bigoted or transphobic supporters of this position. But what if we withheld these labels until absolutely sure? Most people, I think, want to do what’s right. They just have different opinions on what right is,” he wrote.
“If you read between the lines, you could probably see where I stood on the issue,” he later said on a local podcast. But Calkins’ main point was that it’s wrong to call someone transphobic because of expressing support for Cunningham and her views. “Let’s stop hurling these labels around,” he said.
Calkins said he turned the column in on a Friday and was told the next Wednesday that it wouldn’t run, which was when he decided to resign. It was something he’d been thinking about for a while, and it wasn’t an “emotional decision,” he said. It wasn’t the first time a column of his had been killed.
That in itself isn’t unusual. While columnists enjoy more freedom to express their personal views than reporters, that privilege isn’t carte blanche, unless you work for yourself and publish only online. Over the course of my career at multiple publications, I’ve written columns that have been killed and columns that should have been killed but were published anyway. Both kinds are injurious, but the former only to the ego. The latter can put a publication out of business if lawyers get involved. Editors and publishers have pressures on them that are not always visible to writers and readers.
The Seattle Times has not commented publicly on Calkins’ resignation, but there has been a groundswell of support for the writer, not only in the conservative universe.
Writing on Substack, Ethan Strauss called Calkins’ column “quite reasonable” and said that a “sneering impulse” has overtaken the media, at the expense of a serious and thoughtful exchange of competing ideas.
“I believe that this social media-fueled contagion of reflexive, memetic mockery is more important than the trans sports issue itself. Why? Because it informed mainstream media reactions on any matter of dispute. It explains why so many involved in the profession lost an ability to think critically, out loud. When every objection to your group’s consensus is dismissed with fact-free scorn, how can an industry function reasonably? This is how a once influential cohort finds itself on the wrong side of an 80/20 issue. They don’t allow for the idea of ideas,” Strauss wrote.
He was referring to polling that shows that a sizable majority of Americans — usually between 70% and 80% — say that biological males should not compete in women’s sports.
The media’s reluctance to give voice to this position is a holdover from what has been recently called “Woke 1,” a period of enforced ideological conformity that had taken hold of the country prior to the second Trump administration. Trump’s re-election in 2024 offered evidence that his 2016 win was not just a fluke, and social conservatives felt empowered to push back against what they saw as harmful liberal dogma. Their muscle has helped shut down cancel culture, has enabled Cunningham to keep her job and given Calkins the confidence to leave his.
There is a cost to speaking your mind, but there is also a reward if you play your cards right. If Calkins can convert just 10% of his followers on X to paid subscribers on Substack, he should have no problems paying his bills.