from Adam’s Rib: Trans Without Medicine

2023 Robert and Adele Schiff Award winner in literary nonfiction

2 Minutes Read Time

An engraving with fine lines of an old man in a kingly outfit holding a rib bone and standing over a man sleeping under a tree.
Heinrich Aldegrever (German, Paderborn ca. 1502–1555/1561 Soest) The Creation of Eve, from The Power of Death (Allegory of Original Sin and Death), 1541 German, Engraving; Sheet: 2 15/16 × 1 7/8 in. (7.5 × 4.7 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Henry C. Bernstein, 1973 (1973.525) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/428722

As a child, I puzzled over the biblical story of Eve’s creation from one of Adam’s ribs: “And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man” (Gen. 2:21–22, King James Version).

This made God the first surgeon. I pictured Him as an elderly, gray-bearded man, plunging His callused fingers into Adam’s body, parting the younger man’s tender skin like He would later part the waves of the Red Sea. After plucking Adam’s rib from his spine as deftly as my mother snapped the wishbone of a roasted chicken, He then, I imagined, stitched up the wound with the fibrous threads of a palm frond.

But a lot of critical details seemed to be missing from the story. How did God stop Adam’s bleeding? What about pain? And how did He make sure Adam woke up again? I knew about these things because my grandmother had gone in for surgery when I was five. She slept for a very long time after, too long, my mother explained, and when she finally woke up, she seemed like a different person.

As I grew, more questions came to me: Why a rib and not some other bone? Did it have something to do with people thinking women should be curvy? How many ribs did Adam have to begin with? Twenty-four or twenty-five? Either number seemed unbiblical—what with the Ten Commandments, forty days, forty nights, one hundred cubits and all. So, did this mean that after God made Eve, Adam lived out his years with only twenty-three ribs?

Many people, it turns out, have this question, some even believing that all humans assigned male have one fewer rib than females. To be male, then, if we follow this line of thought, is to be always in a state of deficit, a little bit short on bone.

The rest of the essay is omitted here online per the author’s wishes.

Read more from Issue 21.1.

Sun icon Moon icon Search icon Menu icon User profile icon User profile icon Bookmark icon Play icon Share icon Email icon Facebook icon Twitter icon Instagram icon Bluesky icon CR Logo Footer CR Logo Topnav Caret Right icon Caret Left icon Close icon

You don't have credit card details available. You will be redirected to update payment method page. Click OK to continue.