I'm reading [*The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary*](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B0028T8T40) by Robert Alter. He translates Genesis 1:27 as:

```
And God created the human in his image,
   in the image of God He created him,
    male and female He created them.

```

In the footnotes, Alter says:

> 
> In the middle clause of this verse, "him," as in the Hebrew, is grammatically but not anatomically masculine. Feminist critics have raise the question as to whether here and in the second account of human origins, in chapter 2, *'adam* is to be imagined as sexually undifferentiated until the fashioning of woman, though that proposal leads to a certain dizzying paradoxes in the following story.
> 
> 
> 

Immediately after this short poem, God commands humanity to "be fruitful and multiply", which would be difficult without a woman. Still, there are examples in nature of [self-fertilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogamy) so it does not seem out of the question that a single human could have accomplished this task on their own, if God allowed it. Of course, this would be somewhat different from [other mythology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphroditus) which envisions a merging of genders rather than a split.

Chapter 2 describes God fashioning Adam from the earth and then fashioning every type of animal and bird from the soil in hopes of finding a sustainer (to use Alter's translation). When none of those creatures will do, God performs surgery on Adam to remove a rib and uses that material to construct Eve. While it certainly changes the way I imagine this story playing out if Adam was androgynous before Eve, I don't see the paradoxes Alter suggests.

Does the text of Genesis rule out a theory that, at least before Eve, Adam was not specifically and anatomically male?