MATT CALKINS: I was a sports columnist at the Seattle Times for 11 years. This is why I resigned.
16-year-old Ahnaleigh Wilson, who’d lost to a biological male in a track and field race in eighth grade and was holding a sign reading “Thank You Sophie for Speaking up for Girls!”
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One thing Wilson emphasized to me at the rally was that she wasn’t anti-trans. Another student-athlete named Frances Staudt — who said she’s endured daily verbal abuse after refusing to play against a biological boy in a basketball game — echoed Wilson’s sentiment.
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.
In 2023, Jeremy Clarkson wrote thusly about his longtime former employer:
Remember, what everyone on every BBC platform fears more than anything is a Twitter backlash, so to try to keep that festival of left-wing madness happy, they have to be even more left wing and even more right-on. And they have to make sure that every show is pitch-perfect to the BLT+ community and the ethnic minority communities and the community communities, and when you’re thinking defensively like that, the concept of informing and educating and entertaining pretty much goes out of the window.
Considering Seattle was held hostage by an inflamed leftist Twitter mob during 2020’s infamous “Summer of Love,” the editors of the Seattle Times are likely even more afraid of being devoured by their core subscribers than the BBC.
