He Said What He Said: Male Sports Columnist Makes Bold Move Against Woketivism in Sports Media

We've written a lot in recent weeks about the manufactured controversy surrounding Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham's stance on protecting women's sports, and how it seems like the WNBA is hellbent on barreling down the path to self-destruction.

The purported "women's sports" league has done little to nothing to support Cunningham and her fans who appear at games in the face of a steady stream of harassment, the type of harassment that has included two teenage female fans of Cunningham's getting yelled at during a recent Seattle Storm game - by one of the co-owners.

In another instance, WNBA security guards actually made two fans put on t-shirts over the ones they were wearing because the original t-shirts, which had a pro-women's sports message, were allegedly offending others at the game they were attending.

Among female sports columnists, there is a similar sentiment in certain corners, with USA Today sports columnist Nancy Armour frequently defending the idea of men invading women's sports and trying to shame anyone who dares to disagree. This snippet from a May 2023 column, which we wrote about at the time, came to mind:

Don’t be fooled by the people who screech about “fairness” to cloak their bigotry toward transgender girls and women, the transgender girls and women who have the audacity to want to play sports, in particular.
This is, and always was, about hate, fear and ignorance.

Kinda comical considering the strong likelihood that Ms. Armour got bumped out of some plum reporting assignments by male sports writers back in her heyday, but I digress.

All of that said, all hope is not lost in the wide world of sports media, as evidenced by the actions Seattle Times sports columnist Matt Calkins took after the newspaper spiked several columns the veteran sportswriter did on women's sports, including one from the perspective of two female student athletes, one of whom was the one that allegedly got yelled at by the Storm's co-owner.

Here's what he wrote on X Thursday afternoon:

After 11 years as a sports columnist at the Seattle Times, I have decided to resign. 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. It was one of several pieces of mine that had been spiked, and I no longer felt like I could properly do my job as a columnist. I lay out the situation in greater detail in the link below, but I want to say that I enjoyed my time with the paper, find the talent there to be immense, and have no animosity toward anyone who works there. It was just time for a change.

He expanded more on what happened at the Substack link he provided:

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. 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.
My response? To resign on the spot.

Calkins also shared the details of other columns that also got spiked (bolded emphasis added by me):

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.

Yep, and we certainly can't have that, now can we?

He went on to write that he was "scared sh**less" as to what the future held for him on the writing front, but said, "that fear beats the indignity of being muzzled."

In a world full of Nancy Armours, we need more Matt Calkins. Desperately.

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