“Fear beats the indignity of being muzzled.” These are the words freshly unemployed former Seattle Times writer Matt Calkins wrote Thursday on his Substack. “All that’s certain is that I’m done holding back. The best things in life are free — speech being at the top of the list,” he continued. 

Earlier this week, Calkins resigned from his 11-year post as a sports columnist at The Seattle Times. His departure came after his editors refused to run a piece he wrote on biological men not belonging in women’s sports. 

Walt Heyer, a senior fellow at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand that some people in the media are in “goose step” with “God rejecting” trans activists. Heyer said that Calkins “wanted to give a voice to women, which is not allowed” under the standard of the woke, hypocritical, and double-standard-riddled culture. “This is sadly another casualty of the truth,” he remarked. 

Calkins said that his decision was not an emotional one. It wasn’t the first time one of his stories has been thrown out. Calkins recalled that any previous piece of his not published “challenged prevailing newsroom narratives and likely would have triggered the outrage mob.”

“Freedom of the press is a great thing. In America, you can choose what to publish and what not to publish. But that freedom always comes with a cost: someone will disagree,” said Jared Bridges, editor-in-chief of TWS. “What a publisher decides to do when doing the right thing risks rallying the mob is very telling. Publishing by mob rule isn’t freedom of the press at all.”

Calkins recounted that at the end of last month, he spoke to attendees of a rally in support of Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham outside of the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle. One interviewee of Calkins was Ahnaleigh Wilson, a 16-year-old girl, holding a sign that read, “Thank You Sophie for Speaking up for Girls!” Wilson lost a track and field race to a biological male in the eighth grade. 

“I didn’t know if I was going to write something at that point, but after she allegedly got cussed out by a Storm co-owner during the game, I felt like I had to weigh in,” Calkins recalled. 

Titled “Agreeing with Sophie Cunningham’s stance doesn’t make you transphobic,” Calkins submitted the column to his editor the morning of July 31. 

“Supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic, so let’s stop throwing those labels around,” Calkins described as being the central idea of his piece on his Substack. 

After days of publishing delays from various editors at The Seattle Times and no feedback, Calkins was ultimately told that the story would not run, since Calkins had not informed his editors in advance of the topic. 

“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,” Calkins wrote. So, he resigned. 

“I’ve always thought that it was a columnist’s duty to generate discussion on the most hot-button issues. To avoid such topics was to leave the reader shortchanged. I guess in the end, I just didn’t feel like I could do my job properly anymore,” Calkins penned. 

“Every journalist has to make a decision at one point or another: Am I going to let them publish this under my name or not publish what I think is the truth?” said Mark Tapscott, senior congressional analyst at TWS. “And if not, then you have to make a decision: Am I going to stay or go? From what I know about the Seattle case, this is an example of when going is the right thing to do. It’s not easy, but it’s the right thing.”

Calkins wrote that he is grateful for his time at The Seattle Times. He doesn’t know what will come next for him beyond that. “Maybe I’ll be a dental assistant in two years. I genuinely don’t know,” he mused. 

But when deciding whether to resign, he said he remembered this Albus Dumbledore line: “We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.”