Zhenevere Sophia Dao
Zhenevere Sophia Dao is the founder of the philosophy of Post-Daoism and the MogaDao practice tradition, and the SACRa Theater Company. A teacher and innovator of mythosomatic practices for nearly 30 years, she is a writer on a wide variety of spiritual, philosophical, and cultural subjects. She was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and has published fiction with Penguin Books. She lives in a small cabin deep in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, and in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she teaches the PEDAGOGIA, or teacher training immersions of MogaDao, and online classes from her home.
Zhenevere Sophia Dao is also the founder of the organization, The Transgender Necessity, a platform of lecture, dialogue, and mediation the purpose of which is to help educate individuals, and the institutions they represent, with regard to the cultural necessity of transgender people. For what we might call the culture at large at its best "tolerates" trans people as individuals deserving to define themselvses as they wish. At its worse, of course, current culture sees trans people as abominations of nature and symbols of the destruction of the very normative order that makes civilization possible—as dangers, in other words, to right values and human felicity. Thus, all of the prevailing cultural attitudes toward the transgender experience miss the nobility of the trans journey, its bravery, its awesome self-determination, its positive influence on human development. The Transgender Necessity is Zhenevere Sophia Dao's attempt to create a place of visibility for this nobility, and thus to begin to advance "tolerance" toward celebration, and bigotry, at the least, toward tolerance.
