The Underground Girls Of Kabul

"Several years ago, Swedish journalist Jenny Nordberg was researching a piece on Afghan women when a comment by a 10-year-old put her on the trail of a different story. “Our brother is really a girl,” the child said. Nordberg initially assumed it was a misunderstanding or a joke, but the girl’s mother, parliamentarian Azita, confirmed it. Azita has four daughters, not three daughters and a son as she presents to the world; her 6-year-old, Manoush at birth, became Mehran. With hair cut short and dressed in pants, Mehran enjoys more freedom than her sisters: She can leave the house, look men in the eye, speak freely without fear. As her mother puts it, “I wanted to show [her] what life is like on the other side.” Astonished, Nordberg sets out to discover whether other girls like Manoush/Mehran exist, and she finds many. She details their lives in “The Underground Girls of Kabul.”

Despite the overthrow of the Taliban and years of Western influence, Afghanistan remains a male-dominated culture, especially in poor, rural areas. When a woman gives birth only to daughters, sometimes families resort to Azita’s tactic — dressing a girl as a boy, usually “turning her back” when puberty hits. For Azita, having a son was necessary for her to be taken more seriously as a politician; for other parents, a son is required to provide income, to protect the honor of daughters, even as sympathetic magic to cause the subsequent birth of a boy — a folk belief that may predate Islam." - Star Tribune

"'I was astonished, and didn’t quite believe them at first,' she remembers. 'But it was true.'

Intrigued, she began searching for more bacha posh and soon discovered that the phenomenon of families with sons who were actually daughters was more common than she realised.

'These girls are brought up as boys by their parents for several reasons but at the core of it is that in Afghanistan, only boys count.

'In a deeply patriarchal society, where only men inherit property and can support their families by working, a family without sons is seen as weak, incomplete and the parents are pitied.

'So as strange as it may seem at first, it’s a way for people to get around that injustice, and it’s not uncommon for a family with only daughters to just dress a daughter as a boy, and present her as such to the outside world.'

Families who do turn their girls into boys benefit from higher status and are also allowed to send their bacha posh out on errands - something that no girl is allowed to do.

'In Afghan society, a boy can roam around freely, play outside, ride a bike and hang out with other boys and adult men,' explains Nordberg.

'A girl is much more sheltered and restricted at all times. The bacha posh get to see more of the sky and what life on the side of privilege and rights is like. It can also mean a chance of going to school, in areas where it may be more difficult for girls to do so.'

But while the bacha posh enjoy more freedom during their time spent as boys, the transition back to female life can prove almost unbearable.

'The bacha posh are expected by society to revert back to being girls, and young women, around the time of puberty,' explains Nordberg.

'That is when the small window of freedom closes, and a girls is put in a headscarf and a skirt, to prepare for marriage to a man of her parents’ choice.'

Among those to find it impossible is Zahra, a 15-year-old who appears in the book, and who says she never wants to go back and be a woman in Afghanistan.

Others, such as Shukria Siddiqui, a 36-year-old mother of three, make the transition. More still, Nordberg's friends Nader and Shahed among them, never make the switch and continue to live disguised as men.

Nordberg is clearly heartbroken for them. 'I think it’s upsetting that this practice needs to exist to this day,' she says, passionately.

'To disguise yourself as a boy or a man is something that women have done throughout history when they have been denied basic human rights, such as the right to an education, or the right to choose when and if she gets pregnant.

'These girls are not so much a gender story but a symptom of an extremely dysfunctional society that inevitably has to change.'"
- Daily Mail.