Redux

Like Venus, they were said to have been created as adults. Therefore, reason would assume that they had never have been in need of an umbilical cord and, consequently, would not possess the scar, or navel, resulting from the removal of this fleshly lifeline. Those who opted to paint the famous first couple without a navel saw the result as eerily unnatural looking, some of them painting in a tree's or a shrub's stray leaf to conceal the missing scar. Others painted the navel, whether, logically, it should be present or not, Titian being among them.

Because of the scripture that reads, "male and female, he created them," some artists had rendered Adam and Eve as a single, hermaphroditic creature, so, from that standpoint, Danielson supposed that there was some precedent for depicting Eve as a transwoman, although, by the same standard, he ought also to portray Adam in the same vein, as having had both breasts and a penis and testicles and, for that matter, a vagina as well. Instead, he painted the couple as his patron had insisted, Adam as a typical, but idealized, man; Eve as a male-to-female transsexual who had opted out of sex-change surgery, deciding to keep her male genitals as part of who and what she was, neither fully male nor fully female, but a member of a rare and mystical third sex.

The portrayal of Eve as a transwoman, rather than as a woman, enriched the mythical and theological implications of the Genesis account of divine creation. Was the serpent's temptation to her designed to encourage her to change her sex, to become a woman rather than a man or a hermaphrodite? Was it to forego the possibility of womanhood in order to embrace manhood or hermaphroditism instead? Was it to become both male and female? Was the temptation to become less, as either a woman or a man, or to become more, as a hybrid mixture of both sexes? What was God's will with regard to human sexuality and gender? What was nature's purpose, if any, in the process? Were Adam and Eve meant to embrace heterosexuality exclusively, or both heterosexuality and homosexuality, or, indeed, for that matter, transsexuality? The substitution of the transsexual Anne for the female Eve as the central player in the fall of humanity introduced all these questions and more.