Last week’s Matt Calkins vs. The Seattle Times debate teemed with such utter lack of nuance that the innocent and vulnerable, true points of contention – transitioned or transitioning teens – were the ones who took the most harmful jabs.
Thanks to Calkins and his defenders, the term “biological male” is seared into public consciousness as a factual designation of transgender athletes competing in (mostly, high-school) girls’ sports. In Washington state, transgender girls are not banned from competing in girls’ sports. But that’s not the crux of the case Calkins quit his job over trying to make.
One of the subjects of Calkins’ spiked column, Ahnaleigh Wilson, 16, claims she finished second to a transgender athlete at a Junior Olympics track meet two years ago. Girls are not required to provide proof affirming their biological sex before being allowed to compete in gender-separated sports. Neither Wilson, nor her parents, and not even the Title IX complaint filed by the Washington Parents Network explain how the winner of this particular race was proven to be a “biological boy.” The only proof offered were photos showing the first-place finisher to be bigger than the other participants.
And a plain, unsupported declaration — the same “fact” that Calkins used.
I started my journalism career as a copy editor in The Seattle Times sports department. If I had edited Calkins’ column, the third or fourth question I would have asked is how he knew the runner who beat Wilson was transgender and a “biological boy.” If Calkins couldn’t or wouldn’t answer, I’d have referred his column to editors higher up in the department.
My actions would have been informed by my education in journalism at Seattle University, my graduate education at Columbia University, and my training and experience at the Times. It would not have been the product of some liberal agenda supposedly pushed upon employees at media outlets like the Times. I’ve never been asked to change the slant of any story I’ve written, nor have I attended or been forced to attend any meeting laying out the rules of maintaining the left lean of the Times or any other outlet for which I’ve written.
Moreover, I thought everyone knew that The Seattle Times is editorially conservative (or, at least, centrist), sometimes to the chagrin of members of its staff who are independently leftist in their political thinking – against which they (are supposed to) shield their reporting.
In this case, the Times’ caution betrayed itself and its readers. The 130-year-old daily newspaper has yet to comment on Calkins’ departure. As such, it has allowed Calkins to set the narrative, namely that the newspaper censored its former columnist – and not for the first time – in what is strongly implied as a campaign to prevent challenging “prevailing newsroom narratives and … (triggering) the outrage mob.”
The latter was not my experience at the Times. In 1996, I wrote a column in support of NBA player Mahmud Abdul-Rauf, who stopped standing for pre-game renditions of the national anthem. He did so to protest the way this country – his country and mine – discriminated and oppressed people like him, Black and Muslim. And like me, a Japanese American whose community was forcibly removed and incarcerated during World War II.
I joined Abdul-Rauf in what I thought was a silent and respectful protest. The resulting rancor (back in a time when you had to write out, stamp, and mail your outrage) filled a large cardboard box and included death threats such as an offer to send me back to Japan in a pine box.
The Times also received so many phone threats against me, it asked the Seattle police officers acting as security to monitor me more closely during subsequent Sonic games.
It’s instructive that Calkins’ editors, as he claims, never gave him feedback during a protracted period, then killed his column with only an explanation that Calkins failed to declare the subject of his column in advance.
As I insinuated earlier, there are numerous holes in Calkins’ now-unspiked column (it’s appeared in the New York Post, among other places). Though it’s becoming less so, journalism is a collaborative effort. If editors had problems with the column, they would have offered Calkins a chance to revise, and they’d go back and forth – until the holes were filled or the author became intransigent.
If his editors behaved as Calkins claimed, then the Times deserves all the thorns being flung its way, especially along the parade their former columnist has paved through the right wing of this country.
The problems with Calkins’ column begin with its lead. I say that after great deliberation because, as a writer myself, I try my hardest as an editor to preserve the writer’s voice. Calkins opens, “Some people saw bigotry. I saw bravery,” about a pair of teenagers making dubious claims that he failed to check.
Then, in introducing the “biological male” trope, Calkins writes, “men have higher testosterone levels and different skeletal and muscular frames, which together produce significant performance advantages.” True, but he attributes these to transitioning males going through a process Calkins clearly does not understand. If he’d tried, he’d have learned that studies in an emerging field show that hormone therapy for males results in greater fat mass, less lean mass, and a reduction in strength.
This, and more, leads to the Matt Calkins Theorem, that two things can be true at once. I fact-checked this, and he’s right: I am at once confused and outraged at how Calkins twisted this truism to obscure his prejudices.
The reason I’ve dropped this piece onto a Substack dedicated to Rainier Beach High School boys basketball is because I cover that championship team as an example of Black excellence and source of South Seattle pride. I usually write opinion pieces about race and other marginalized communities, so there is connective tissue to RBHS hoops and transphobia.
I point this out because the two-things-can-be-true-at-once theorem has been applied throughout the history of humankind, including in the justification of this country’s original sin. “Black people are inferior” begat “separate but equal” begat “redlining and ghettoization” and so on. You can’t say you want to exclude a certain type of people, but that desire doesn’t mean you’re racist, misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, or whatever other phobia you possess.
It doesn’t work that way. It never has.
Not only that, but scholars argue that female athletes of color have historically faced outsized scrutiny and false accusations over gender. To wit, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting faced hostility and false accusations during the 2024 Olympics. In 2009, South African runner Caster Semenya was sidelined for 11 months because of track and field regulations around hormone levels. It turned out that Semenya had a condition that caused naturally high testosterone.
I’m not the only one who believes that Calkins’ unspiked column and Substack justification are part of a larger and longer pattern in his work. Reposting the canceled columnist’s tweet, women’s basketball writer Roberta F. Rodrigues wrote, “Good news, Storm media. You won’t have to share the media row with someone who upholds sexist, transphobe and racist narratives anymore.” By Calkins’ own admission, other columns killed by the Times included one questioning whether U.S. Women’s Soccer Team players really were victims of discrimination in their equal-pay lawsuit. Another tried to use a Black basketball coach, Mike Bethea of Rainier Beach, to urge the public not to stereotype cops shortly after the murder by police of George Floyd.
One of my original reactions to Calkins’ resignation was disappointment in the Times, because of its championing of the First Amendment and giving voice to the voiceless. There cannot be degrees of free speech, after all. But the Times did not censor Calkins; we all can now read his work. He was an employee offered unguaranteed access to the Times platform. From my experience, that access hinges on high standards of writing, reporting, ethics, and at least a genuine effort to be unbiased.
From what I (forced myself to) read of Calkins over 11 years, he often failed those standards. That’s bad on the Times. It hired him and allowed him to keep the column.
When the inimitable Larry Stone (admission: I once tried to hire him away to be an executive at Rivals.com when it was still in startup mode) retired in 2023, I suggested the Times think out of the box. My idea was to split the column and hire three diverse voices, which not only would have provided more voices to the voiceless, it actually would have saved the newspaper some money. Instead, it hired Mike Vorel, yet another white man, to pair with Calkins and fortify an industry already dominated by white men.
The demographics of the U.S. newsroom creates a White Male Gaze with which all of us are familiar because it’s the default in this country. The white maleness of mainstream news media, especially in sports, one of the only diverse segments of U.S. society, foments mistrust and lack of support by marginalized communities. Change will not come willingly, on any side, so it must be nurtured by exposure to difference.
Leaning into white male voices also is the Times’ bad, one it now has an opportunity to fix.
Two things can be true at once, after all. Matt Calkins was rarely a pleasure to read, and The Seattle Times overlooked that fact to the point of becoming less relevant to so many of us.
Glenn Nelson is a Japanese American journalist and lifetime South Seattle resident who founded The Trail Posse and has won numerous national and regional awards, including for the South Seattle Emerald, for his writings about race.
Thanks for this, Glenn. Very thoughtful!