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The Afghan Girls Who Live as Boys
In a society that demands sons at almost any cost, some families are cutting their daughters hair short and giving them male names.Jenny Nordberg
Mehran, age 6, first arrived at her kindergarten in Kabul as Mahnoush, in pigtails and a pistachio dress. When school shut down for a break, Mahnoush left and never returned. Instead a short-haired, tie-wearing child with the more masculine-sounding name of Mehran began first grade with the other children.
Nothing else changed much. Some teachers were surprised but did not comment except to one another. When the male Koran teacher demanded Mehran cover her head in his class, a baseball cap solved the problem. Miss Momand, a teacher who started her job after Mehrans change, remembers being startled when a boy was brought into the girls room for afternoon nap time but realizing, as she helped Mehran undress, that she was a girl. Mehrans mother Azita later explained to Miss Momand that she had only daughters, and that Mehran went as the familys son. Miss Momand understood perfectly. She herself used to have a friend at school who was a familys only child and had assumed the role of a son.
Officially, girls like Mehran do not exist in Afghanistan, where the system of gender segregation is among the strictest in the world. But many other Afghans, too, can recall a former neighbor, a relative, a colleague, or someone in their extended family raising a daughter as a son. These children even have their own colloquialism, bacha posh, which literally translates from Dari to dressed like a boy. Midwives, doctors, and nurses Ive met from all over the provinces are more familiar with the practice than most; they have all known bacha posh to appear at clinics, escorting a mother or a sister, or as a patient who has proven to be of another birth sex than first presumed.
The health workers say that families who disguise their daughters in this way can be rich, poor, educated, or uneducated, or belong to any of Afghanistans many ethnic groups. The only thing that binds the bacha posh girls together is their families need for a son in a society that undervalues daughters and demands sons at almost any cost. They disguised their girls as boys because the family needed another income through a child who worked and girls arent allowed to, because the road to school was dangerous and a boys disguise provided some safety, or because the family lacked sons and needed to present as a complete family to the village. Often, as in Kabul, it is a combination of factors. A poor family may need a son for different reasons than a rich family, but no ethnic or geographical reasons set them apart.
And to most of them, the health workers told me, having a bacha posh in the family is an accepted and uncontroversial practice, provided the girl is turned back to a woman before she enters puberty, when she must marry and have children of her own. Waiting too long to turn someone back could have consequences for a girls reputation. A teenage girl should not be anywhere near teenage boys, even in disguise. She could mistakenly touch them or be touched by them, and be seen as a loose and impure girl by those who know her secret. It could ruin her chances of getting married, and she would be seen as a tarnished offering. The entire familys reputation could be sullied. For that reason, and because the bacha posh I spoke to were minors, some names and details have been changed in the story that follows.
more...
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/the-underground-girls-of-kabul/379762/
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The Afghan Girls Who Live as Boys (Original Post)
Purveyor
Sep 2014
OP
defacto7
(13,485 posts)1. Now look up the Afghan tradition
Bacha Bazi
MADem
(135,425 posts)2. That tradition is an horrific crime. nt
defacto7
(13,485 posts)3. To add a link
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/brinkley/article/Afghanistan-s-dirty-little-secret-3176762.php
It's a tradition dating hundreds of years to the war lords and comes from a perverted interpretation of the Koran where women are unclean and unseen. Where there are no women the men looked to the boys. Their saying is, "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure".
The world is.... well... I sometimes have no words.
It's a tradition dating hundreds of years to the war lords and comes from a perverted interpretation of the Koran where women are unclean and unseen. Where there are no women the men looked to the boys. Their saying is, "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure".
The world is.... well... I sometimes have no words.
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)4. You know if I had to guess...
The practice almost certainly is more ancient than the Koran - it mirrors similar practices from Greece (which as the Macedonian Empire, ruled Afghanistan for a time - one of only two empires to pull that off) as well as early Buddhist practices, which also had an aAfghan presence. it's likely that a pre-existing chauvinistic pederast tradition was simply excused away by a bad interpretation of a chauvinistic new religion.
A Little Weird
(1,754 posts)5. Women in Afghanistan
Given this, who would not walk out the door in disguiseif the alternative was to live as a prisoner or slave? Who would really care about long hair or short, pants or skirt, feminine or masculine, if renouncing ones gender gave one access to the world? A great many people in this world would be willing to throw out their gender in a second if it could be traded for freedom.
Women in Afghanistan are treated so badly. I had never heard of this practice - the article makes it seem that it is not all that uncommon. I'll bet it's awfully hard on these girls when they finally have to stop pretending to be male and lose all the freedom they have known.