In the Muslim world, where women are denied basic human rights — from divorce and driver’s licenses to protection from abuse or honor killings — there is no worse place than Afghanistan.
The United Nations, Save the Children and the Thompson Reuters Foundation have ranked Afghanistan the worst place in the world to be a woman, a mother, a child and a newborn. The average life expectancy for a woman is 44.
Little surprise, then, that girls there don’t want to be girls.
In her new book “The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan” (Crown), journalist Jenny Nordberg explores the little-known phenomenon of the bacha posh — the girl or woman who passes, at home and in society, as male.
There is no historical record, no census-taking or database, but, as Nordberg writes, “One degree beyond the foreign-educated Kabul elite, many Afghans can indeed recall a former neighbor, a relative, a colleague or someone in their extended family with a daughter growing up as a boy.”
Mehran
By the time she was 6, Mehran lived as a boy. The youngest of four, Mehran was born to an illiterate father and his second wife, an educated politician named Azita — “the rebel mother,” as Nordberg writes.
Mehran’s mother knows better than anyone the dangers of being a girl. Her parents sent her to Kabul University, and she was eventually elected to the nation’s parliament — yet her father forced her to marry an illiterate cousin who beats her.
“Why would I make my daughter into a son if this society was working?” she asked Nordberg. “Nothing has changed, and nothing will change. It’s only going in the wrong direction here.”
In Afghanistan, women burn themselves to death rather than suffer any more physical abuse at the hands of their husbands. In the early days of her marriage, Azita attempted suicide by overdosing on medication, and there are still days she’ll think about it. “Maybe I’ll just end this stupid life,” she told Nordberg.
Here, a husband can rape his wife freely, and it will never be called rape. Children are the sole property of the husband, who may divorce his wife at any time — but she may not leave him. Brides can’t even take their own vows; their male representative does so for them.
And when a woman gives birth to a girl, there are usually tears: another child who is not a boy. In Afghanistan, a woman’s sole purpose in life is to bear sons. And in a country where 9 million adults are illiterate, it’s still believed that a woman can have a son if only she wishes hard enough. Even the educated believe that a woman’s uterus is directly connected to her brain.
When Azita and her family relocated to Kabul in 2005, her four daughters were an impediment to her career. Politicians and citizens expressed deep suspicion: If Azita couldn’t give birth to a son, how could she be trusted to hold a seat in parliament? Why would anyone want to be represented by such an abject failure, or a woman who perhaps didn’t want sons badly enough? What kind of woman was she?
Shortly thereafter, Azita and her husband came up with a plan. They asked Mehran, their youngest girl, if she’d like to become a boy. She immediately said yes.
“I wanted to show my youngest what life is like on the other side,” Azita said.
So they chopped off Mehran’s hair, bought her a pair of jeans and a boy’s denim shirt. Suddenly, their 6-year-old daughter was now their 6-year-old son, a conceit everyone in the neighborhood went along with — it’s that common in the culture. Azita herself spent five years of her girlhood as a boy and considers her time treated as an equal among men invaluable.
“I was not afraid of them,” she told Nordberg. “I have had their experience too, so I am never embarrassed to speak to men. Now no men will ignore my power. Nobody will ignore my talent.”
Mehran’s father has enjoyed the status his new “son” confers. Mehran has so taken to life as a boy — the freedom to fly a kite, to go to the bazaar, to climb trees, to speak up whenever the urge strikes — that his father sometimes forgets what’s really going on.
“To be honest, I think of him as a boy,” his father said. “When I see him, I see only my son.”
When Nordberg asked about what will happen to Mehran in the future — when his bacha posh has to go back to being a girl, and the impact that will have — he had no easy answer.
“This is the need for today, and I don’t know about tomorrow,” he said. “She knows she is a girl, and when she grows up, she will understand the difference better, too. This is life in Afghanistan.”
Zahra
Zahra was made a boy when she was 2 years old. At 15 and living with her parents in Kabul, she was still holding on. “People use bad words for girls; they scream at them on the streets,” she said. “When I see that, I don’t want to be a girl. For always, I want to be a boy and a boy and a boy.”
Little is known about the psycho-sexual impact that living as a boy has on these girls. Most parents try to make their children switch back before the onset of puberty, but for those who resist, there is an uncertain future.
The few physicians and academics who are familiar with the phenomenon are Afghans themselves, and the conclusive finding of one — female obstetrician Dr. Fareiba, who has been present at deliveries when doctors declare a newborn girl a boy — says there’s nothing wrong with it. “It’s our society; it’s our culture.” She does, however, advise that a bacha posh be turned back just before puberty, lest the child become “a little strange in the head.”
For Zahra, she has the best of both worlds. “My mother always tells me I am a girl. But my neighbors call me a boy. I feel like both. I feel happy I am both.”
Like Mehran’s father, Zahra’s father forgets that Zahra was born a girl. “All the time I am reminding myself that she is really my daughter,” he told Nordberg. “But she has made herself into so much of a boy, I can’t help it that I forget.”
Unlike her sisters, Zahra can run errands, shop freely, hang out with boys. She likes that they don’t gossip as girls do, that they don’t have to wear makeup or cover their bodies and heads, but she doesn’t think they are superior to girls. In fact, she hates the way boys treat girls, and her dual existence — actually, by now, her dual nature — gives her unique insight.
“Boys are stronger than girls,” she told Nordberg. “They can do anything and they are free. When I was a child, everyone was beating me and I cried. But now, if anyone tries to beat me, I hit back.”
Her hero is Jack Bauer of “24” — weirdly, a hugely popular character in Afghanistan, where the boys and men interpret him as the epitome of the honorable Afghan: a relentless fighter, unstoppable, righteous.
Zahra doesn’t want to stop being a boy, nor does she want to renounce being a girl. Her dream is to move to a country where she can live as both.
“All the work that boys do, women can do,” Zahra said. “You know, women can be men, too. Like me.”
Shukira
Shukira’s mother was 13 years old when she was married to a 43-year-old man; his first wife couldn’t get pregnant. Her mother got pregnant right away, but the first baby died at just a few months old — as did the next. The third baby, a boy who survived a likely poisoning, led her mother to suspect the first wife of infanticide. When she confronted her husband and demanded a divorce, he beat her unconscious.
“I will never give you a divorce,” he said.
So when Shukira was born, her mother made her a boy immediately. To the outside world, the baby was Shukur, and this child had one purpose: to protect the life of the older brother. The two went everywhere together, slept in the same bed, and Shukur would eat and drink everything placed in front of her brother first — if someone was going to die of poisoning, it wasn’t going to be the family’s real boy.
Her parents told her such a role was an honor.
When she was 15, Shukur got her period, and never told her father. She wanted to keep being a boy, even though that meant she had to do the arduous physical labor her favored older brother was spared. It was better than becoming a woman and having to give birth — she’d been told by her mother that the baby would just explode out of her belly.
By the time she was 17, the Taliban had come to power, enforcing complete gender segregation. It was far too dangerous for Shukur to keep living this way, and her parents decided to marry her off. She was given to a man who’d seen her around, who knew that this boy was really a girl — he understood, because there was a bacha posh in his family, too. As an act of kindness, he let Shukur wear pants around the house — it was the least he could do, since she could no longer leave home on her own.
Today, Shukur is a mother of two boys and a girl, and would never permit her daughter to live as a boy. She herself has never gotten over it.
“Becoming a man is simple,” she told Nordberg. “The outside is easy to change. Going back is hard. There is a feeling inside that will never change.”
Bleak future
Today, at 10, Mehran is still straddling genders. She goes to an all-girls school in Kabul, but at home she is a boy. Her mother, Azita, lost her seat in parliament, and her jobless husband blamed her for no longer supporting the family. Azita had also been in constant conflict with her husband’s first wife, who had been terrorizing Mehran, insisting she revert to girlhood, yelling that she was no man’s equal and never would be.
Azita’s husband began beating her again, and she told Nordberg she had never so fiercely regretted not leaving Afghanistan when she had the chance — she had international contacts, could have gotten her children out. But she thought she was being a patriot and a role model for her daughters, raising them in an Afghanistan she would help reform.
“I feel so guilty for them now,” she told Nordberg. “I was so selfish. I was thinking of my country and its future.”
Even Azita’s father knows there is no hope.
“Afghanistan is not a developed country,” he said. “It’s not an educated country. There are no rights for women here and most men feel like women should just obey them.”
This is why he raised Azita as a boy for five years, and why his granddaughter is also one, albeit part-time. It is better than nothing, he says, because “I cannot change society. We can’t hide anywhere. Our society is sick.”