Yesterday’s New York Times featured a story about “bacha posh:” girls and young women who dress up to pass as boys. Families that lack a son make one up.
Ten-year old Miina goes to school for two hours each morning, in a dress and a head scarf, but returns about 9 a.m. to her home in one of Kabul’s poorest neighborhoods to change into boys’ clothing. She then goes to work as Abdul Mateen, a shop assistant in a small grocery store nearby.
She could never work in the store as a girl, just as her mother could not. Neither her husband nor the neighbors would look kindly on it. “It would be impossible,” Nasima said. “It’s our tradition that girls don’t work like this.”
And yet, they are working like that. Dressing the part is all it takes to gain admittance to the club. I find it confounding that if a girl dresses as a boy, she is a boy–with all the rights and responsibilities maleness entails.
Zahra, 15, has dressed and acted like a boy for as long as she can remember. She does not want to go back to being an Afghan woman. “People use bad words for girls,” she said. “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.”
It is deeply cruel to offer girls a taste of relative freedom before forcing them to adapt to second-class status later in life. Shukria Siddiqui, 36, grew up as a boy but had to quit the facade at age 20 because her family found her a husband. Now a married mother of three, she constantly thinks back to “[her] best time,” as she calls it. Asked if she wished she had been born a man, she nods.
It really blows my mind that anyone who bought into the idea of male superiority would allow a girl to take on the role of a boy for practical reasons. Girls masquerading as boys prove they are capable, strong members of a family and society; all the other girls living as girls are such a huge untapped resource.
God that’s depressing. I wish I had a more constructive comment to leave but it just makes me so sad for all of those girls.
I read this story this morning and was thinking about posting it, because the cognitive dissonance (a woman in the article refers to it as “creative thinking” or some such) is just boggling.
The note about the girl asked to dress/act as a boy by being offered “more fun and freedoms”? It kills me. That women recognize and (have to) accept such inequity, and that the inequity promotes poverty and suffering, and that tends to make people fearful and conservative, which entrenches inequities…
Patriarchy hurts everyone, people. Even, ultimately, the Patriarchs.
There was a similar tradition in Croatia/Serbia where sonless parents passed a daughter as a son. They were called Virdzina– Virgins. They remained “male” for life, though, inheriting the family name and property, and keeping the family “honor”.
An excellent drama about a young girl in this situation was made in 1991 by the same name. Impossible to find in the states, though. Booo.
The hypocrisy is just amazing. They will tie themselves into pretzels just to uphold the status quo, even if it’s unhealthy and impractical for all involved.
And lest we get too smug over here in the United States, may I recommend the blog No Longer Quivering? The women there tell stories of horrific abuse at the hands of patriarchal Christian cults. It’s happening now, it’s growing, and it’s horrifying.
I was going to say that the logical next step would be to recognize that if girls successfully do what boys do, then why are there all these restrictions on girls? But I guess it’s possible to look at the male trappings of the performance as the dominant indicator, rather than the character and skills of the girls themselves.
It’s funny, because I read this story this morning too trying to think about the fluidity of gender and sexuality and trying not to impose my own Western knee-jerk reaction on this, but as I went through it, it became so clear that this wasn’t about fluidity at all. The gender roles are as reified as could be, in this situation; the difference is that people allow their daughters to play with them, but then at some point retract permission. I felt so bad for the one who said she wished she’d been born male. What if she really is a trans person, now condemned to adopt the “wrong” gender? Yikes.
In that culture, girlhood doesn’t mean what it means here. It’s more like childhood=boyhood, girlhood=stifling prison, worthlessness.
The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that the families that would do this are those that do not believe in the segregation & strict gender roles but abide by them anyway because their communities do. Maybe they would send their girls out to do “boy stuff” but they are too afraid to without presenting them as boys (and tricking the community).
At first, I was horrified by the misogyny.
In the article, the little bacha pos of the MP’s family slaps her sister, and her mother ruefully comments on how successfully she has taken on the male role.
Then I started to think about the level of acceptance for the bacha pos within the community. The girls don’t decide for themselves to swap gender roles,it comes from their families: and the people in their local neighbourhoods accept that the family has a boy child called Mehran, and not a girl child called Manoush.
Is this a very pragmatic way to undermine the prevailing attitudes, and give girls training in self-assertion?
There was a film made called Osama that kind of touches on this. Warning – it left my crying somewhat hysterically.
It’s about maximizing the whole society’s fertility. The cross-dressing just provides that margin of flexibility to allow families in unfortunate circumstances to survive.
We have much the same going on in the US, or did, for many years, where a “career woman” was mostly childless, kind of an honorary man, and set apart from ordinary housewife-women.
And, a lot of time, that honorary man status was temporary; a career woman would often get married, have children, and become just another woman.
People in this decade seem to have forgotten how recent that was… even in the ’80s in the Middle of Nowhere, OK, I knew that Career Women like my aunt played by different rules than women like my mom.