The Underground Girls of Kabul (21 page)

A young unmarried woman is, in other words, under a bigger threat from within her own family than the outside world, should she even be suspected of not behaving properly. That’s why it is called “honor killing”—justifying the murder of a young daughter by her own family to preserve and protect their own reputation.

At almost sixteen, Zahra no longer feels like “both” a man and a woman, as she described it when I first met her. At this point, more than a year later, she dismisses her physical sex and views her female body as something that must change.

Neuroscientists agree with Dr. Fareiba’s observation that puberty is “a dangerous time for the mind”—or rather, that puberty is when the human brain expands and takes a huge leap forward, fueled by hormones, which help grow a personality and form a gender identity.

As Zahra’s situation shows, the experience of a
bacha posh
also begins to leave a more permanent mark when a girl goes through puberty as a boy. As I encounter more adult women who have grown up as
bacha posh
, I note that those who herald their boy years usually experienced them only as children. Any potential empowering effects of living on the other side seem to be preserved in an adult woman only if her time as a boy was brief, and ended before puberty. After that, just as in the case with Zahra, it quickly becomes far more complicated.

In another country, Zahra would perhaps by now be suspected of having what the World Health Organization terms
gender identity disorder
. It is defined as “persistent and intense distress about being a girl, and a stated desire to be a boy.” Resistance to growing breasts and to menstruating are two other things cited in such a determination.

In order to qualify for an adult diagnosis of the disorder, there should also be distancing from one’s own body. The definition of adult
transsexualism
is “a desire to live and be accepted as a member of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by a sense of discomfort with, or inappropriateness of, one’s anatomic sex, and a wish to have surgery and hormonal treatment to make one’s body as congruent as possible with one’s preferred sex.”

But what Zahra is or has, or what she might be afflicted by, cannot be directly compared to any Western version of a child or young adult who is uncomfortable with his or her gender, and upon which existing research in the field has been made.

According to Dr. Ivanka Savic Berglund, a neuroscientist at Karolinska Institutet’s Center for Gender Medicine in Stockholm, who studies the formation of gender identity in the brain, a person’s diet, personal experiences, and environment all affect hormone levels. So even if Zahra were to be examined by doctors, her blood drawn, and psychological evaluations made, she could still not be placed side by side with most Europeans or Americans in similar studies. Growing up in war, living as a refugee, and eating a different diet, Zahra may have a physical and psychological makeup that is too different to compare.

What also makes Zahra distinctly different from other children or young adults in the Western world with a possible gender identity disorder is that she was picked
at random
to be a boy. As with other
bacha posh
, the choice was made for her. For that reason, it would be hard to argue that she was
born
with a gender identity issue. Instead, it seems as though she has
developed
one. That, in turn, could mean that a gender identity problem in a person can be
created
.

I
N A
W
ESTERN
context what may constitute such a disorder is not far from clear-cut, either.

The children brought to Dr. Robert Garofalo, director of the Center for Gender, Sexuality and HIV Prevention at Lurie Children’s
Hospital of Chicago, can be as young as three or four when expressing a feeling of having been born in the wrong body. Among those at the forefront in the world of understanding how gender is formed in children, Dr. Garofalo receives one or two referrals per week, often from parents who have at times lived in fear and shame because their children do not fall into expected gender roles.

In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association removed “gender identity disorder” from its list of mental health illnesses. Dr. Garofalo prefers not to pin a specific term on the children he works with, as he tries not to get stuck on a binary view of gender and the idea that a person always needs to be one or the other and possess absolute feminine or masculine traits only. In his view, what goes on with these children is “part of a natural spectrum of the human being—not an -ism or thing or condition that requires fixing.”

No one knows today exactly why some children identify with a gender that is different from their anatomic sex. Multiple factors such as genetics, hormones, and social structures are all thought to play a role. Treatments for advancing one gender or the other in children who fall in the middle of the gender spectrum are currently still experimental and controversial.

“There is plasticity in children,” says Dr. Garofalo, who believes that what he calls a nonconforming gender identity could probably be created in a child over time, such as the case with Zahra seems to be.

But one would also need to consider what part of Zahra’s desire to be a boy is directly related to the experience of being a woman in Afghanistan. Would she really want to be a man in another environment, where most people did not care whether she wore a head scarf or a pair of pants, and where women had more opportunities?

Maybe Zahra could be seen as healthier than most. Or does the desire to wear pants and not to get married actually need a cure? Maybe it is something else that should be defined as sick. Zahra’s situation could even prompt a whole new category in the World Health Organization’s index: “Gender identity disorder due to severe and longtime segregation.”

When one gender is so unwanted, so despised, and so suppressed, in a place where daughters are expressly unwanted, perhaps both the body and the mind of a growing human can be expected to revolt against becoming a woman. And thus, perhaps, alter someone for good.

Z
AHRA SITS CROSS
-
LEGGED
on a carpet, her eyes fixed on the small television set on the floor. The title of the Indian drama translates as “story of love,” and Zahra has been following it for a while. It is a Bollywood take on the
Twilight
series: The main character is from a vampire family, but one day he falls for a non-vampire girl. From that, a complicated romance unfolds.

I ask if she’s ever been in love. She smiles faintly. “No. I don’t want to be. I’m not crazy like that.”

“What will you do if they force you to get married?”

“I will refuse to get married. My
no
is a no! When I grow up, I will go to the West, where nobody gets involved in your business. My will is very strong, and I will refuse my parents. Nobody can force me to do anything.”

“Would you dress like ‘a woman’ in the West?”

She shakes her head at me in disbelief. “Don’t you understand? I am not a girl.”

I hand her our parting gift from one of the Kabul stores that sells torn T-shirts and jeans, supplying the trash-rock look popular among the city’s teenage boys. It is a gray felt fedora. I explain that I have seen both men and women wear it in New York. Zahra beams with excitement and jumps up to try it on in the mirror, adjusting the brim to give it the perfect angle, casting a shadow over her eyes.

“It’s beautiful,” she says.

T
HE BRIDE COULD
be crying because she is only a year older than Zahra. Or because the husband her parents have chosen is twice her age. Or because she does not know him at all. She could be crying because her husband asked for the hand of her sister, known by reputation to be the more beautiful of the two. And because her parents then decided that her sister could probably do better than this older man of moderate means; so for her, it would be wise to hold out for a bigger offer.

None of that matters. Tears are both expected and required here.

To look happy would be disrespectful to her parents. There should always be some histrionics about leaving the family home. This event is where only a proper girl ends up, and this is what Zahra fears. The bride executes her performance with precision.

It has taken about five hours at one of Kabul’s many beauty parlors to have the virgin bride’s hair perfected into stiff, sprayed curls, her nails painted red, and her face a white-powdered death mask with crimson lips. Her thick, dark eyebrows have been threaded off entirely and replaced by thin blackbird wings. They are the proud mark of a married woman, signaling that she is now taken. Her husband-to-be’s family has spent more than a hundred dollars on this important preparation for the wedding. Beauty parlors were closed under the Taliban, and the stories of their reopenings filled American
women’s magazines after 2001, as evidence of how liberty had finally reached Afghan women.

It is a relative of Setareh’s who is getting married this evening, in what stands to be a rather low-key affair for Kabul. If it had been a ceremony for one of the city’s wealthier families, a Las Vegas–style wedding hall would have been taken over, with thousands invited and fed for an entire day, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars to the husband’s family. A wedding is an event of a lifetime, often paid for with borrowed money that will be paid back over that same lifetime. Afghans often complain about the money, but everyone knows that a lavish wedding display is an important way for families to demonstrate as much power and prestige as they can muster.

As explained by Carol le Duc, this is the moment when daughters are most visibly the cards played by Afghan fathers: “Men make alliances, and not necessarily in the best interests of their daughters. These alliances are related to the social prestige and honor of the family. But it may also be opportunism. They want to marry up to create more security—financial or physical—for the family in a time of need. Freedom of choice is a modern thing, relatively speaking. That is not always practical in terms of how Afghan families measure assets for survival.”

Marriage is a core component of the patriarchal system.

According to Gerda Lerner’s research on ancient societies, a woman could achieve at least some status, and with that, better treatment and privileges, through preserving her only capital—her virginity—and eventually offering it to just one man. That idea evolved into the marriage contract, where a woman vowed to remain sexually exclusive to one man, with the expectation that it would bring him heirs to preserve a lineage of land and capital. Any woman suspected of not being a virgin posed the risk of carrying someone else’s child, which disqualified her as a potential bride.

No group can be truly suppressed until its members are trained and convinced to suppress
one another
. To hold the system of patriarchy in place, a woman could always further prove herself a chaste and
proper person by shaming those who fell short of the mark, Lerner explained. In other words, by calling out other women as suspected whores, as women commonly do to this day.

In Afghanistan, young women are largely removed from this major event of their own lives. Through the
khastegari
process, one family will court another for their daughter. It revolves mainly around money, when the equivalent of a bride price, the
toyana
, is determined. Negotiations between parents take into account how much “wedding gold” will be hung on the bride at the wedding ceremony as literal proof of the wealth of her marriage. The actual ceremony, or
nekah
, is often performed in a small setting with just a mullah and two witnesses. They will visit the bride and ask who she has chosen to speak for her, as she herself is expected to remain mute. Seated or standing behind a piece of fabric that is held up for discretion’s sake, she will designate a brother or her father as her intermediary. The groom then accepts the marriage by uttering the words “I accept it in the present and I accept it in the future” to the mullah, and then when the bride’s male representative agrees three times, the verbal contract is sealed. Rarely will there be a written document of a marriage. By law, the bride should also receive a
mahr
as security, an amount of money or property for her personal use, from her husband. But that detail is usually ignored.

At this wedding, the
nekah
has been completed and the bride is placed on a chair atop a foil-clad stage, homecoming queen–style, so the guests—all females—can take a good look at her dark green, richly embroidered gown and frozen face.

Her dress exhibits a plunging neckline on a flat chest, and her thin, bare arms are covered in gold bangles, stacked so high she cannot even raise her arm to pluck a drink off the many soda-can pyramids on the tables. The female guests sit packed next to one another on the floor as plates of rice and chicken are passed around. The men are next door celebrating in a larger space. The windows are closed and the stale air has little oxygen. If there was a fire, we would likely not all get out safely through the one small door. But any such perceived
risk is less of a concern than that of having men peek in from the outside and catch a glimpse of any dark hair flowing as the guests dance wildly in circles, always with one woman in the middle and the others around her. The makeup is heavy, and everyone is in their best outfits. Even the small children are decked out in tulle and sequins. They fall asleep, one after the other, on the floor. One teenage girl is wrapped in Kermit-like green, like a small elf, with matching green nail polish, eye shadow, and high heels. The gold is on full display, too. Those with the heaviest load on their chests and arms sit a little more regally overlooking the others, knowing they qualify as the richest, most prominent guests with a proven record of fertility, as proved by the gifts from their pleased husbands.

S
MALL GROUPS OF
girls form alongside one wall. These are the proper girls, on the track that Zahra is veering away from. Tonight, they are giddy.