On a pale February afternoon in Vienna, an infant lay sleeping beneath the quiet hum of machines in a neonatal ward. The child’s skin was still translucent, veins like river branches beneath the surface. A nurse adjusted the tube feeding into the child’s arm and turned to check the records. The newborn was assigned male at birth, but the patterns written into the body told a broader story. Before any embryo becomes male, it begins with the architecture of what we would call female. For the first six weeks, all human embryos develop the same way. The default form is what we associate with a female body. Only later, and only with a specific hormonal signal, do some of these bodies begin to shift.
This is not theory. It is biological fact. The male body carries the residue of this origin, and it does not erase the path it once followed. The nipples remain. Useless in their function for men, but present all the same. Mammary glands, undeveloped. Breast tissue, dormant. They are not an addition but a leftover, a biological trail that leads back to the starting point.
Long before the child in Vienna was born, before machines could scan chromosomes or measure hormones, human societies told stories to explain these same mysteries. In some of the earliest Sumerian and Akkadian texts, there are deities who give birth alone. Ninhursag, a mother goddess, molds people from clay. In Ancient Egypt, Isis reconstructs the dismembered Osiris and revives him, bringing him back through her own power. These stories never spoke of ribs. They spoke of breath, of clay, of wombs.
But it was the Hebrew texts that cast a long shadow over the Western world. Genesis, in the second chapter, speaks of woman coming from man’s rib. Yet earlier, in the first chapter, man and woman are made simultaneously, both in the image of the divine. The shift between these accounts reflects not a biological truth but a theological framework rooted in power. It came at a time when inheritance, priesthood, and law were becoming codified under patriarchal rule. The rib story was not science. It was a message.
In the structure of the body, evolution leaves clues. The clitoris and the penis begin as the same organ in the embryo. It is only through the action of androgens that one becomes larger, another remains small. Testicles descend. Ovaries do not. But they share origins. The biological symmetry is not a metaphor. It is a reflection of how life forms.
Even in the language of circumcision, the balance tilts toward men. Circumcision is a ritual of removal, historically justified by religion, cleanliness, or tradition. It marks the male body with the memory of covenant or control. It is public, performed often in infancy, inscribed into medical and moral belief. There is no requirement for women to be marked in this way in societies where circumcision is ritualized. The absence of female circumcision in Judaism and Christianity is not a gesture of mercy. It is the default being left untouched.
The female body, by contrast, is a site of life. It is the only body that bleeds monthly without trauma, that houses another life within it, that produces nourishment. The male body mimics none of these. Even in mammals, the presence of nipples on males speaks not of function, but of origin. Evolution does not remove what it does not need if it causes no harm. And so the story is told again, through the silent symmetry of anatomy.
Modern genetics confirms it in a different way. The mitochondrial DNA that exists in every cell of our bodies is passed only from mothers. Fathers contribute none. If one were to trace the unbroken line of life, cell by cell, it would always pass through the maternal line. The egg is the original cell of life. The sperm is a spark. It brings motion, but not foundation. This is not philosophy. It is observable, testable fact.
In ancient societies where goddesses ruled, creation stories reflected this truth. The first divine figures in pre-Abrahamic traditions were not male creators but female sustainers. Gaia, Tiamat, Asherah. Their temples were centers of power. Their myths were not parables of sin but stories of survival, fertility, and death. It was only with the rise of male-centered religion and empire that the divine was redrawn in male form. The woman was no longer the creator. She became the created.
It is not a question of belief but of record. The earliest deities in human civilization were not gods but goddesses. The oldest known sculptures, from the Venus of Hohle Fels to the Venus of Willendorf, are not images of men. They are female figures, with exaggerated features of fertility. They were carved from ivory and stone long before any written language existed. Before there was myth, there was the form of woman.
The argument that God is a woman is not one of theology alone. It is grounded in the evidence of biology, the trail of history, and the remnants within the male form. Men do not create life in their bodies. They do not bleed with cycles or nourish with milk. Their bodies carry the signs of divergence, not origin. They carry nipples but do not use them. They carry genes but do not pass mitochondria. They are shaped from the form they did not continue.
The symmetry of the sexes in biology does not imply equality in all things. But it shows a starting point. The original blueprint for human life is female. Only later is it changed, redirected by chromosomes and hormones, shaped by time and instruction. In the earliest weeks of life, before identity or name, every embryo grows along a female plan.
That plan is not erasure. It is evidence. It is visible in the chest of every man, in the hidden symmetry of organs, in the quiet architecture of chromosomes. It is present in history, in art, in the fragments of mythology that predate empire. It is spoken not in parables but in the cells of the living.
The child in Vienna will grow and change. The body will continue its development. But the shape it carries beneath the surface will not forget its origin. It cannot. No body does.
