“Will my culture thank me if I disrupt its complacency?” Zhenevere Sophia Dao asks some of the most piercing, identity-deconstructing and soul-generating questions of our time, while she also embodies the answers with deep, poetic presence and humility. In this episode, we speak to this rare teacher, philosopher, embodiment artist, poetess, and transgender woman,  about the mysteries and the politics of gender, and about what she calls “the transgender necessity”. Zhenevere takes us on an up-close and personal journey into her own process of reclaiming her true gender, and, with spellbinding urgency, invites us to consider the social need to not only accept but to celebrate transgender people as messengers of what is possible in a life– and in a culture. ABOUT OUR GUEST Zhenevere Sophia Dao is a poet, novelist, playwright, and director of the SACRA Theater Company in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A transgender woman, she is also the founder of the practice tradition of MogaDao and the MogaDao Institute. Zhenevere was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and has published fiction with Penguin Books. Find more about her work:  www.mogadaoinstitute.com   THIS EPISODE’S WISDOM BITE "Self-othering, or becoming trans inside of a culture or a self,  is what enables an absolute emancipation and a mythopoetic recreation of a new way of being in the world."  "The transgender person is not just to be accepted but to be celebrated as deeply needed and necessary: The self-othering that is a necessary part of a transgender person’s emergence is actually a very important part of everyone psychological makeup. We often make great changes in our lives when we become ‘other’ to ourselves. It is a powerful tool of transparency  to one’s soul that everyone needs. And transgender people, we are masters at that, at self-othering– and of taking that self-othering into transformation and evolution."