Critically Speaking

In this episode, Therese Markow and Dr. Alan Rogol discuss the complexities of gender, sex, and identity in elite sports, with a focus on the societal expectations and controversies surrounding gender eligibility in sports. Dr. Rogol touches on some of the history of women’s identities in elite sports, including some from the recent 2024 Paris Summer Games. Throughout the discussion, Therese and Dr. Rogol highlight the need for inclusive politics and having a respectful approach to athletes’ identities. This is a complicated topic, still undecided as to what is fair and acceptable.

Key Takeaways:

• When women were allowed to compete in the Olympics, originally it was only allowed in three events: croquet, golf, and tennis. All were considered socially appropriate, with no bodily contact, and while wearing normal clothes of full, layered skirts.
• Sex and gender are not the same thing. Gender is self-identified, an expression, and is changeable. There are also varieties of sex - sex at birth, sex of rearing, legal sex, and chromosomal sex.
• Many of the girls who find out they have an XY chromosome after being identified as female at birth often don’t find out until later in life. Because while they had testosterone, they also had a gene that prevented their bodies from responding to it. These girls never developed as males, and in fact went through female puberty, but lacked a uterus.
• The IOC has many drugs that are banned except for certain situations. These include testosterone, endocrine drugs, growth hormones, and insulin among others.

"It is not the level of absolute testosterone that you have that counts. What counts is the stuff that is biologically active, and that is very complicated, and that's why numbers aren't so helpful." — Dr. Alan Rogol

Episode References:

• Personal Account: A woman tried and tested by Maria José Martínez-Patiño: https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140673605678415.pdf
• The New York Times: Running in a Body That’s My Own by Caster Semenya: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/opinion/running-body-semenya.html
• Critically Speaking Episode 9: You Go Girl: Testosterone with Dr. Alan Rogol: https://criticallyspeaking.libsyn.com/009-dr-alan-rogol-you-go-girl-testosterone

Connect with Dr. Alan Rogol:

Professional Bio: https://med.virginia.edu/faculty/faculty-listing/adr/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-rogol-49b18018/

Connect with Therese:

Website: www.criticallyspeaking.net

Threads: @critically_speaking

Email: [email protected]

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

In this episode, Therese Markow and Dr. John Sweller discuss the decline in student preparedness for college and how the modern education system, which has shifted from knowledge acquisition to inquiry-based learning, is at the root of that decline. Dr. Sweller explains his Cognitive Load Theory, breaks down the differences between working memory and long-term memory, and why ineffective teaching methods continue to survive. Finally, they talk about the changemakers in education and how political and bureaucratic intervention can drive educational reform.

Key Takeaways:

• Education changed about 1-2 decades ago. The emphasis switched from the acquisition of knowledge to how to acquire knowledge itself. We need to emphasize the acquisition, not the discovery, of knowledge in education.
• Students who are subjected to inquiry-based educational approaches do substantially worse on international tests than students who are exposed to a knowledge-rich curriculum. The more emphasis your education system places on inquiry learning, the worse the students do.
• If you don’t show students how to do something and they don’t figure it out themselves, it cannot go into long-term memory.
• The best way to obtain information is to obtain it from somebody else. If you want to efficiently have somebody learn something, the best way to do it is to have somebody explicitly explain it.

"An educated person who can do things, think about things, solve problems, which otherwise they couldn't dream about solving, is somebody who's got enormous amounts of information in long-term memory, and that immediately tells us what education should be about. You need to have lots of information in long term memory, and an educated person is different from an uneducated person because of that and solely because of that." — Dr. John Sweller

Episode References:

• Greg Ashman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-ashman-phd-790b59ab/

Connect with Dr. John Sweller:

Professional Bio: https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/john-sweller

Connect with Therese:

Website: www.criticallyspeaking.net

Threads: @critically_speaking

Email: [email protected]

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

In this episode, Therese Markow and Dr. Alex Hinton discuss the complexities of genocide, its definitions, and the role of perpetrators. Dr. Hinton gives us the conventional, legal, and social scientific definitions of genocide and gives examples of how these affect the legal battles and social impact of different incidents, highlighting the Khmer Rouge mass killings in Cambodia. They also discuss the moral and legal implications of perpetrators and why none of us can be complacent in our understanding of genocide.

Key Takeaways:

• There are three main definitions of genocide. Most recognize it as mass deaths, often perpetrated by a state figure. The UN legal definition requires intent. And the social scientific definition expands beyond the UN definition.
• While genocide is an atrocity, not all atrocities are genocides. Similarly, not all mass murders are genocides.
• When legally looking at the genocide perpetrators, the courts typically go after the architects and lower-level individuals are often brought in as witnesses. However, the question of who the perpetrators are is a moral and ethical question still being debated.
• Education is key - the dynamics that gave rise to Auschwitz are all around us and we are all part of them. We must be self-critical, reflexive people as a first step to make sure that we don’t have a recurrence.

"It's a potentiality that exists for ourselves and for our societies. You know, it's not comfortable. Many people will say ‘no,’ but that's the starting point of prevention, because only when you have that realization can you effectively begin to take action to stop genocide from taking place." — Dr. Alex Hinton

Episode References:

• Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning: https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068
• To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue in the Rwandan Genocide by Jennie E Burnet: https://www.amazon.com/Save-Heaven-Earth-Rwandan-Genocide/dp/1501767119/

Connect with Dr. Alex Hinton:

Professional Bio: https://sasn.rutgers.edu/alex-hinton

Twitter: https://x.com/AlexLHinton

Center for the Study of Genocide & Human Rights: https://x.com/Rutgers_CGHR

Check out Dr. Hinton’s writings mentioned in this episode:

• Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Did-They-Kill-Anthropology/dp/0520241797
• Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side: https://www.amazon.com/Perpetrators-Encountering-Humanitys-Stanford-Studies/dp/1503634272
• Anthropolo...

In a world full of media, which may contain misinformation or fake news, there are conspiracy theories abounding. However, conspiracy theories, and the spreading of those theories, are not a new practice, it has been around and transmitted in any way that people communicate. In this episode, Therese Markow and Dr. Joseph Uscinski talk about the origin of conspiracy theories and how these formal theories differ (and are similar) to the fake news and misinformation that fills our media screens today. They discuss some of the earliest US conspiracy theories, as well as some of the more modern ones, and how they are different now, with our current political climate, from what they may have done in the past. They also discuss why people believe these conspiracy theories, as well as why people believe in them, even in the face of refuting evidence.

Key Takeaways:

• The internet did not introduce the spread of conspiracy theories. They will always be spread in any way that people communicate.
• Our worldviews impact the media that we access, which then can filter which conspiracy theories we are likely to believe.
• The two most consistent predictors of those who believe in conspiracy theories are education and level of income.

"Most of the arguments about evidence, really aren’t about evidence - they’re just about subjective judgments about evidence, which gets us away from evidence and gets us back into how people interpret information and what the world views are they bring into interpreting that information." — Dr. Joseph Uscinski

Connect with Dr. Joseph Uscinski:

Twitter: @JoeUscinski

Website: JoeUscinski.com

Books: American Conspiracy Theories & Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them

Connect with Therese:

Website: www.criticallyspeaking.net

Threads: @critically_speaking

Email: [email protected]

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

Dr. Adam Schiavi is an assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine and neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His areas of clinical expertise include anesthesiology, neurological critical care, disorders of consciousness and brain death diagnosis, clinical ethics, critical care medicine, and traumatic brain injury.

In this episode, Therese Markow and Dr. Adam Schiavi discuss how the definition of death has changed throughout history, what the current definition is, and how that is determined by the medical technology of the time. Brain death is the current definition of death, medically, but what happens to a body after brain death is determined can vary depending on the state you live in. This can be a trying time for families and for the providers involved with the now-deceased patient as the definition of death is not understood by everyone. They also discuss how brain death differs from other states of consciousness and how people often confuse the terminology of those different states, as well as the ability to hope for healing from all but brain death.

Key Takeaways:

• The total cessation of all functions of the brain is the current definition of brain death in the United States. This definition is based on a clinical exam testing all parts of the brain, typically done by somebody certified in doing brain death determinations.
• You have to have a reason for the neurologic exam to be declining. Without a reason, you can't call somebody brain dead.
• You can replace every organ in the body, but you cannot replace the brain and when the brain dies, the body dies all the time 100% unless those organ systems are artificially supportive.

"Our culture changes with technology and the way we define death is a part of culture. As that culture has shifted, the way we define death has also shifted with our new technologies of how we can actually determine whether people are dead." — Dr. Adam Schiavi

Connect with Dr. Adam Schiavi:

Johns Hopkins Bio: Adam Schiavi, MD, PhD, MS

Email: [email protected]

Connect with Therese:

Website: www.criticallyspeaking.net

Threads: @critically_speaking

Email: [email protected]

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.