Dressing Afghan Girls As Boys Sets Them Free — For A While

Zahra, a fifteen-year-old girl who has been living as a boy as far back as she can remember, spells out the advantages of the practice:

People use bad words for girls. They scream at them on the streets. When I see that, I don’t want to be a girl. When I am a boy, they don’t speak to me like that.

While girls in Afghanistan can face some unique limitations — several families noted that female members couldn’t work or move freely outside the house — people use bad words for girls everywhere. And there’s something tempting about the idea of simply opting out, quitting the fight for gender equality by joining the winning side. It’s not quite that simple for the girls Nordberg profiles, though. Most have to switch back to their birth gender when they start puberty, because “when their bodies begin to change and they approach marrying age, parents consider it too risky for them to be around boys anymore.” Shukria Siddiqui lived as a boy until she was twenty, when her parents arranged her marriage. She still thinks of her years as a boy as “my best time,” but says, “for me, it would have been better to grow up as a girl, since I had to become a woman in the end.”

For many of the girls and women in the article, life as a boy seems like an all-too-brief reprieve from the strictures they’ll have to face in the rest of their lives. But near the end of the piece, Azita Rafaat, Mehran’s mother, reveals that “for some years I also been a boy.” Now she’s a member of Afghanistan’s Parliament, and she thinks her years as a boy were key to her success. She says, “I think it made me more energetic. It made me more strong.”

It’s sad that she couldn’t learn that strength growing up as a girl — and once again, Afghanistan isn’t the only country where girls’ are prevented from developing and demonstrating their true strengths by a variety of limitations. Obviously dressing up all girls as boys isn’t the solution to sexism the world over, but it’s interesting how, in many societies, a few women have found ways around the boundaries of their gender. From Albania’s sworn virgins to jazz musician Billy Tipton, living as a man has long been a way for some to circumvent the limitations imposed by their birth sex. And while this tactic may not help those who still identify as girls and women, there’s something triumphant about those who have managed to escape — at least for a time — the pernicious effects of gender discrimination. Says Zahra, “I’ve been in fights with boys. If they tell me two bad words, I will tell them three. If they slap me once, I will slap them twice.” Her mom has tried to get her to change back, but she says, “For always, I want to be a boy and a boy and a boy.”

Afghan Boys Are Prized, So Girls Live The Part [NYT]

Image via NYT