In this episode of The End of Sport, hosts Derek Silva, Johanna Mellis, and Nathan Kalman-Lamb speak with Dr. Sheree Bekker and Dr. Anna Posbergh about the pseudoscience that continues to shape much of the anti-trans movement in sport.
Drawing from sociology, feminist theory, and sport studies, they unpack how flawed scientific claims about biology and fairness have been used to justify exclusionary policies against trans athletes.
The conversation addresses the ways these arguments gain legitimacy through the language of objectivity, even when they rely on outdated or manipulated data. Dr. Bekker and Dr. Posbergh explain how these ideas circulate across media, policy, and sport governance, shaping public perception and influencing laws that harm trans people. They emphasize the role of critical scholars, journalists, and educators in challenging these dominant frames that present trans inclusion as a threat to sport itself.
The episode highlights why resisting pseudoscientific narratives is essential to building a more inclusive sporting culture. By questioning who defines fairness, whose bodies are regulated, and whose voices are heard, this discussion reminds listeners that defending trans athletes is not only about inclusion but also about defending the integrity of science and the principles of social justice.
Listen, share, and support The End of Sport, a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, a community of over sixty leftist podcasts at harbingermedianetwork.com.
This episode is a webinar called "Kick Israel Out of FIFA: No To Zionism in Football" recorded on September 29, 2025, moderated by sports journalist and friend of the show Leyla Hamed. Guests include our very own Nathan Kalman-Lamb, as well as Abubaker Abed, Nicola Hadwa ,Jill Thomson, Kat Vilarev, Shireen Ahmed, Ajamu Baraka, Roger Waters, Robert Wilson, and Bram Hanekom.
"The Israeli settler state’s assault on Palestine in collaboration with the U.S. and its allies, is normalizing fascism on a global scale. We must fight this on all fronts, including the world's most popular stage: Football.
Football is not separate from this struggle; it is a crucial battleground. Sporting events, like the 2026 FIFA World Cup, cannot be allowed to whitewash genocide. That’s why we demand FIFA ban Israel and the U.S. from World Cup participation until they comply with international law.Join the webinar to learn how we can collectively oppose fascism/zionism and israel in football." -- Just Peace Advocates
In this episode of The End of Sport, Nathan and Derek sit down with Dr. Tracie Canada, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of The HEARTS Lab at Duke University, to discuss her new book Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football (University of California Press). A decade in the making, this Black feminist analysis confronts how college football exploits and harms the young Black men who dominate rosters across the United States. While universities and coaches lean on the “football family” myth, Dr. Canada shows how a genuine brotherhood among Black players emerges alongside the tireless care of mothers who support their sons on and off the field. This conversation explores the deep inequalities of the sport, the forms of care that resist them, and what Tackling the Everyday contributes to ongoing debates about race, exploitation, and the future of college football.
You can order Tackling the Everyday directly from University of California Press with a 30% discount by visiting https://www.ucpress.edu/books/tackling-the-everyday/paper and using the code UCPSAVE30.
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Aidan Simardone, an immigration lawyer and immigration advocate, to talk about Olympic hopeful Tamarri Lindo and his family who are on the verge being deported from Canada at the risk of extreme violence. However, it's possible for us to push the Canadian government to reverse course and not deport the Lindo family -- listen and act now.
Read more about this story here.
This episode features the full press conference responding to Tennis Canada’s decision to host Israel’s Davis Cup team in Halifax while barring fans from attending. The decision to host Team Israel in Halifax comes as Palestinians face mass death, displacement, and the destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, and infrastructure — with overwhelming evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity documented daily. Organizers say this match is not a neutral sporting event but a deliberate political act: a propaganda stage and public relations shield for a state actively committing genocide.
Speakers call for sports boycotts as a response to ongoing war crimes. They also announce two demonstrations this weekend in Halifax:
Friday, September 12, 2:30 p.m. at Garrison Grounds
Saturday, September 13, 12:00 p.m. at Halifax Commons Oval
Confirmed speakers include Isaac Saney (Halifax Committee Against Imperialist War and Genocide), Ben Sichel (Independent Jewish Voices), Em Bailey (Palestine Solidarity Halifax), Kate MacKeigan (Labour for Palestine, Kjipuktuk/Halifax), Tarek Gazawi (local Palestinian community member), Najlaa Najlaa Khaled, (Gazan Canadian Families), El Jones (Athletes vs Genocide), and Asaf Rashid (International Centre of Justice for Palestinians–Canada).
Recorded live at the Bus Stop Theatre on September 10, 2025.
For more, see Shireen Ahmed's piece in The Rover.
In this special episode, Nathan sits down with signatories of a letter demanding the reconsideration of hosting a Davis Cup match between Canada and Isreal scheduled to take place September 12-13 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to discuss why they signed it and why this urgent call is necessary now more than ever. Featured in this episode are S. Michael Lynk, former United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory (2016-2022) and Professor Emeritus of Law, Western University, Professor Hernan Humaña, York University and Former Canadian Olympic Coach, Beach Volleyball, Professor El Jones, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, Economics, and Canadian Studies, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Professor Chen Chen, Assistant Professor, University of Connecticut, and Professor Daniel Sailofsky, Assistant Professor of Kinesiology, University of Toronto and part of UofT’s Jewish Faculty Network.
You can see the letter here.
You can read about the letter here.
You can watch Nathan speak about the letter here.
In this episode, Nathan sits down with former college basketball coach, professor, and novelist Rus Bradburd to discuss his new novel Big Time and a career working in and around college athletics. The conversation delves into the myriad problems in higher education and college sport today as well as meta questions about how to deliver critique.
You can order Big Time from Etruscan Press here.
On this special episode, Dr. El Jones, former poet laureate of Halifax and Assistant Professor at Mount St. Vincent University, explains exactly why it is imperative that Tennis Canada/Sport Canada cancel the pending Davis Cup match with Israel slated to be played in Halifax in early September.
Our piece on the Davis Cup.
Olympic runner Moh Ahmed joins call to cancel Canada's Davis Cup tie with Israel.
Nathan is joined by friend and eminent hockey scholar Kristi Allain to break down how to understand the Hockey Canada trial and its implications for the sport and Canadian culture.
Read: Olympic runner Moh Ahmed joins call to cancel Canada's Davis Cup tie with Israel
This episode examines the destruction of athletes, athletics and athletic infrastructure in Palestine by Israeli forces. We discuss how athletes and sports spaces have been targeted, the loss of facilities and opportunities for athletes, and the broader impact on community life and youth development. The conversation addresses the concept of athleticide as part of a wider pattern of cultural and social erasure through sport.
Leyla Hamed is a UK-based football journalist and sports law specialist, originally from Morocco and born in Spain.
We are finally back! After a very long hiatus, the podcast returns with a lengthy recap from Derek and Nathan of some of what has transpired since we last recorded in the United State and Canada, but with a particular emphasis on the ongoing genocidal atrocities in Gaza, with a focus on the so-called aid sites.
Then, Nathan has the pleasure of welcoming Irish Sport for Palestine leader and former Ireland basketball captain Rebecca O'Keeffe on for a discussion of global athlete responsibilities in the face of the genocide. Rebecca talks us through the efforts in Ireland to boycott basketball games against Israel, while Nathan raises the possibility of similar protests in relation to Canada's upcoming Davis Cup tennis match against Israel in Halifax.
In this episode, Nathan has the distinct pleasure of talking to Jesse Mez of the Boston University CTE Center about his team's recent study on the prevalence of CTE among hockey players, developments in the diagnosis of the disease, and the ethical and public health implications of both violent sport and research studying head trauma, among other things.
Jesse Mez is Co-Director of Clinical Research at the Boston University CTE Center and Associate Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine.
Please consider supporting the show via our Patreon!
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.
In this episode, Nathan is joined by Max Jordan Nguemeni to discuss all the ways in which college athletes are denied the academic experience they are promised as a wage in exchange for their campus athletic work. We work through the themes explored in the chapter on this topic in Nathan and Derek's new book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game, drawing on Max's experiences tutoring athletes at Georgia Tech and Nathan's time teaching at Duke.
Max Jordan Nguemeni is Assistant Professor and Doctor of Internal Medicine at UCLA and author of the Substack column Adverse Reaction.
Please consider supporting the show via our Patreon!
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.
We present this recording of the talks that comprised a panel discussion on challenges to Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting's claims to womanhood hosted by the UNB Faculty of Kinesiology on Friday, November 29th.
The Olympic boxing match in the welterweight category between Italy’s Angela Carini and Algeria’s Imane Khelif lasted less than one minute. This match sparked a firestorm, leading to misinformation and erroneous commentary regarding Khelif’s sex and gender. Various celebrities and online critics alleged falsely that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had allowed a man to compete in women’s boxing. However, these claims were unfounded. Imane Khelif is a cisgender woman, a fact clearly affirmed by both her and the IOC. After Khelif’s initial match, Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting also faced similar scrutiny fueled by misconceptions about her gender identity. Both women ultimately won gold medals in their respective categories.
The panelists examine why these incidents became so controversial in today’s climate of rising global fascism and discuss their political implications, as well as the impact on the experiences of transgender individuals.
Celeste E. Orr, PhD: Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Wendy J. Robbins Professor in Gender & Women's Studies, University of New Brunswick. Their research focuses on intersex studies, disability studies, and queer studies, among other broad areas, and they are the author of the 2022 book, Cripping Intersex, with UBC Press.
Kristi Allain, PhD: Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Physical Culture and Social Life at St. Thomas University. Her research focuses on the dynamics of power at play in sport and Canadian national identities.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb, PhD: Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, where he teaches on social theory and sport. He is co-author of the forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game and author of Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport. He is co-host of The End of Sport podcast.
Please consider supporting the show via our Patreon!
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.
In this episode, Nathan is joined by trans participation in sport scholar and authority Anna Posbergh to discuss the abusive treatment of an athlete on the San Jose State women's volleyball team, what it says about the current state of inclusion with respect to trans participation in sport, and also how it figures into broader trends of political transphobia. We also delve into some of the actual science and why it has no relation to the claims of the anti-trans brigade.
Anna Posbergh is Assistant Professor of Kinesiology at Florida State University. Anna's work can be found in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Sport & Communication, the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Sociology of Sport Journal, and many more!
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.
In one of our most important episodes to date, we present a keynote panel called "Can there be sport at a time of Genocide? Solidarity, Community, and Palestinian liberation" held at the annual meeting of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) on November 1st, 2024. The panel was organized by Chen Chen and co-moderated by Derek and Nathan.
Panelists included Dr. Sophia Azeb (UC Santa Cruz), Charlotte Phillips (Palestinian National Women's Football Team), Omar Dreidi (NBA Agent and Athletes for Ceasefire), Dr. Kat Pijetlovic (Catholics School of Law and Palestinian Football Association), Rebecca O'Keeffe (Irish Sport for Palestine) and Dave Zirin (The Nation and Edge of Sports).
Illuminating the role that athletics can and do play in times of what many observers have characterized as genocide, it is important for those interested in sport to reflect on the ways in which sport and sporting cultures work to legitimize, normalize, and in some ways operate in complicity with the ongoing systematic destruction of an entire people, social infrastructure, and cultural apparatus. What is the role of academic communities in building international and intersectional solidarities as a pathway to dismantling Empire? Where do scholars of sport, sport studies and athletes fit in the critique and challenge to settler colonialism from Turtle Island to Palestine? How and to what end can solidarities be built amongst scholars and athletes? In this panel, we address these important questions and attempt to answer perhaps the most pressing of them all for our organization: what does sport (and the study of sport) mean during genocide?
The End of Sport Podcast is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, your left podcast community. Find us in great company with over 60 other shows at Harbinger Media Network. As always, if you’re enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and, please, leave us a five-star review as those always help us read a wider audience.
