Trans Athlete Stories... and the Journalists Who Fear Them

So I heard about a story, and I wrote about it this week, about a columnist, a sports columnist out in Seattle for the Seattle Times.

Matt Calkins, who wrote a piece, a column about transgender athletes.

And he wrote it from the point of view of two transgender athletes who thought it was a bad idea for biological men to compete against biological women.

Hardly a controversial position to take.

The Seattle Times spiked the column.

spiked in journalistic language means they killed it.

They wouldn't run it because it was about a trans athlete story.

And of course they'll never admit this, but it was from the wrong, wrong point of view.

Now in Matt Calkins case, he had challenged liberal orthodoxies in sports before, and those stories were also spiked.

So he said, you know what? I've had enough of this.

I quit.

And then he wrote to explain his position.

I'm going to read you a sentence.

He said, supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn't automatically make you a transphobic.

So let's stop throwing those labels around.

Again, a perfectly reasonable position.

The reason I found this story so interesting is because the same thing happened to me.

just a few years earlier at Real Sports on HBO, where I worked for 22 years.

I did a story about trans athletes.

It was absolutely down the middle fair, had both sides of the controversial issue.

It was reasonable and honest and all everything good.

And I'm not just saying that because I was the correspondent on the story.

It really was fair.

And the day before the story was supposed to run, we got an email from the main character, a trans woman, long distance runner at a college in the Northwest of this country.

And she said, if you run the story, and she let us know one day before, one day before that if we ran the story with her in it, she would sue us.