We are living through the most intense public argument about gender in living memory, and somehow managing to conduct it without agreeing on what the most basic terms mean. The word cisgender — or just cis — is either standard vocabulary on HR onboarding documents and medical intake forms or, depending on where you live and who holds power at the moment, possibly a slur, possibly banned from government buildings, possibly both at once. The word has been around for thirty years, but its history is largely unknown to the people who argue or legislate against it. What most people are currently fighting about today is a simplified, mainstream version of the concept that traveled a long way from its origins before arriving in the culture war.

In this episode, we sit down with Perry Zurn, Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. Zurn's new book, Cisgender: Disorienting a Category (Duke University Press, 2026), is the first sustained philosophical and historical account of how the term cis entered the gender lexicon, where it came from, what it was supposed to do, and what it has actually done. Drawing on unplumbed archives, interviews with early trans community figures, and parallel conversations in Argentina and Brazil that predate the American discourse, Zurn argues that cis is more useful as a name for a set of norms and privileges than as a description of any person's inner life. Moreover, the category, when pressed hard enough, begins to unravel in philosophically generative ways.

Grab a drink and join us as we pull apart a word everyone uses, almost no one can define, and that is more radical, more contested, and far more philosophically interesting than the version currently being banned from Twitter.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/cisgender

---------------------
SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/hotelbarsessions (Or by contributing one-time donations here: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/donate/)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website (hotelbarpodcast.com) for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts through our "Contact Us" page on the website!

Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!

Sports are one of the few remaining arenas of public life where tens of millions of people voluntarily agree to care about the same thing at the same time. As the World Cup reminds us every four years, sports can build identities, drive economies, organize civic loyalties, and transform old geopolitical wounds into something that at least resembles a game. Whether you played Little League, follow your city's team with religious devotion, or find the whole spectacle baffling, sports have philosophical stakes that run deeper than the scoreboard.

What actually makes something a sport — and does the answer matter? What does that tell us about fairness, rules, and what it means to win? Can fandom build genuine community, or is it just tribalism? And when institutions like the NCAA funnel the passions sports inspire into donor pipelines and broadcast deals, what gets lost and who gets exploited?

Grab a drink and join us as we step onto the field with Aristotle, Iris Marion Young, William James, and Bernard Suits to find out whether the philosophy of sport is worth playing.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/sports

---------------------
SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.

Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!

In the spring of 2026, Anthropic released to the public what it described as its most capable AI model to date... and then the U.S. government shut it down seventy-two hours later. That subsequent sequence of events, both strange and almost operatic in its timing, is the kind of thing we might genuinely call "unprecedented." It was also a crystalline illustration of something philosophers have been decrying for decades, namely, the difference between performing ethical responsibility and actually exercising it.

What does it mean to reason morally about the risks of a technology about which we do not yet fully understand its potential future impacts? Given that a very small number of decisionmakers will shape the conditions of life for everyone else for the next several decades, what do they owe to the people who will bear the consequences of those decisions without having had any say in them? When "ethical AI" has become a brand strategy rather than a careful, historically-informed and theoretically-grounded practice, how do we hold anyone accountable for the gap between what they say and what they do?

Grab a drink and join our co-host Leigh M. Johnson as she asks us to consider exactly how sloppy the current "AI ethics" discourse is, what moral reasoning actually requires. and why the people who most need to be doing it seem to be the ones least interested in the task.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/mythosfablefarce

---------------------
SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.

Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!