Seattle Times columnist Matt Calkins wrote a column in which he interviewed fans of Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham. The column is available , but not the Times’ website.
After the Times declined to run the column, Calkins his position as a staff sports columnist, a job he’s held the last 11 years.
Cunningham, who’s averaging 8.8 points per game this season for the ‘s Indiana Fever, gained an outsized proportion of fan interest because of her lightning-rod views on transgender participation in women’s sports.
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“I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans,” Cunningham . “And I’m like, ‘I never once said that.’ 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 sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
the thesis of his column was “that supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic” — a line the fans Calkins interviewed attempted to hold — “so let’s stop throwing those labels around.”
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Ostensibly Calkins’ editors didn’t see it that way. he was told the column did not run “because I didn’t tell him I was doing this in advance.”
Calkins has tried to use sports as a vehicle fill in the gap in so-called “wedge issues” in national politics before. The Times twice spiked two of those columns, he .
“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,” Calkins . “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.”
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