American sports columnist resigns after editors block his article about women’s sports

On August 20, 2026, Matt Calkins, a regular sports columnist at the American newspaper The Seattle Times for eleven years, decided to call it quits. The reason was a column he had submitted in late July about two high school students from Washington state who had spoken out publicly against transgender girls participating in girls’ sports. According to Calkins, the editorial team spent days reviewing the piece, with several editors reading and commenting on it, before ultimately telling him it would not be published. Calkins dismissed the official reason — that he had not announced the topic in advance — as a pretext.

The column concerned a high school sports controversy that had erupted weeks earlier around WNBA player Sophie Cunningham, who had openly spoken out in favor of protecting the women’s category in sport. The case is explored in detail on gendersport.nl. Two high school girls, including Eastmont High student Wilson from East Wenatchee, subsequently attended a Seattle Storm game to support Cunningham’s position. Calkins wrote about it: there was no profanity, no malicious intent was apparent — it was simply a schoolgirl demonstrating what some people seem to find difficult to accept: that disagreeing with the current approach to transgender participation in women’s sports does not automatically make someone transphobic.

Not the first article to be shelved

Calkins stressed that this was not an isolated incident. Earlier columns he had written had been blocked for similar reasons, and according to him they all shared the same feature: they ran counter to the prevailing narratives within the editorial team and would presumably have provoked outraged reactions. The point at which editorial involvement turns into steering is the subject of an article on gendermedia.nl. For the columnist, enough was enough. “I have always believed that a columnist’s job is to get people talking about difficult subjects. Avoiding them means letting the reader down. In the end, I simply felt that I could no longer do my job properly,” he said when he left. Within hours of his resignation, Calkins had already received an offer from another sports outlet to write for them.

A debate that is embarrassing American media

The incident did not happen in isolation. The question of whether transgender women and girls should be allowed to compete in the women’s category of sport has been dividing the United States for some time, and the issue has escalated further in recent weeks around the WNBA. In June 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that states may bar trans women from girls’ and women’s sports. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert sent teams an internal memo because players and staff were increasingly being asked about transgender participation, while the players’ union, the WNBPA, issued a statement emphasizing diversity and inclusion. Polls show that the American public is almost evenly divided on the issue, with tensions rising rather than easing. The fact that an experienced sports columnist would rather resign than suppress his convictions illustrates how difficult established media apparently find it to make room for a position that their own editorial team considers too sensitive — even when that position, as Calkins emphasizes, has nothing to do with hostility but with a principled question about fair competition in women’s sports.

Why this is more than an American anecdote

For readers outside the United States, this incident is relevant because the same pattern — editorial reluctance to publish critical views on gender policy in sport — is also visible in European media. In the Netherlands, this is discussed in the article about the media and public debate. Journalists who question the current approach to transgender participation in women’s competitions increasingly report reluctance from their own editorial teams, more so than on other social issues. Calkins’s resignation shows that this reluctance does not affect only freelancers or outsiders, but also established, long-serving employees at major editorial organizations.