Defining and Representing Gender | The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance In Afghanistan by Jenny Nordberg

When my mother was pregnant with me, if I was a girl I would be named Kate and if a boy I would be named Jake. My next sibling would have been named Jake if she had been a boy. The sibling after that also would have been Jake had she been born a boy. It wasn’t until child number four that my parents finally got their Jake.For my parents, Jake was a name they liked. They wanted kids and I am sure were excited when they had a son, but they were also excited about their three daughters. Had they been living in Afghanistan, things might have been different.

In Afghanistan, not having a Jake earlier would have been a sign of weakness in my mom. A defect. And, what I’m learning from The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance In Afghanistan by Jenny Nordberg is that me or one of my sisters might have been assigned the role of a bacha posh, or a girl who lives as a boy until reaching the age of puberty. This gender swap is thought to bring luck to the mother, making it more likely that she will later give birth to a son. It makes it easier for females in the household to have a male to act as chaperone when going out in public, because even a small boy is a suitable chaperone. It saves the mother the shame of being thought to be defective and unable to birth males. For the girl-turned-boy, it gives her freedoms she might not otherwise know. She can come and go freely from her house, wear pants, continue in school, work outside of the home. Once puberty hits, the girl-turned-boy turns back into a girl.

As I’m reading this book, I’m struck by how arbitrary our definitions of gender are. Sure, some of the biological functions are pretty clear. But other ways we express out gender identity are purely made up. The ways we define and treat gender so often leads to inequalities, although perhaps not always as dramatic as Nordberg describes in The Underground Girls of Kabul. My immediate reaction during my reading is to be angry at how little freedom women in that country are experiencing. But I also make a conscious effort not to immediately condemn another culture, even if that’s my initial reaction.

When I stop and think about women in this country, I’m reminded of when my friend Delicious shared an article about calling girls “pretty” and suggesting that people might compliment his daughter instead by commenting on how clever she is. I think of the six-week-old baby I got to hold last week that was a pile of squishy cheeks and thighs, wearing a dress made of layers and layers of tulle and sporting an anklet. I look outside at the college boys and girls going out on dates, or whatever the equivalent is of a date in college-going culture now, where the boys are in casual shorts, tees and sneakers and the girls are strapped into skirts that barely cover their butt crack and heels that are an accident in the making ands boob hoisted up as high as they will reach.

And so I am still reading about these women in Afghanistan, living as boys. Sometimes living as men. Usually transitioning back to being women and going on to be mothers and leading successful, feminine lives. And I’m reminding myself, sometimes every page, that the definitions I’m reading of gender are different. Not better and not worse. But different. (I don’t curtail my opinions about the freedoms the women are experiencing.)

And I’m trying to be a little more critical of how I’m choosing to define and represent my own gender. How I’m seeing it represented in pop culture. How I’m helping to instill it into nieces and nephews. That bit about a bacha posh helping give a prospective mom better luck in giving birth to a boy aside – because I can’t really speak to that, the gender definitions we assign shouldn’t cause so dramatic a difference in the life of a person as what Nordberg details in The Underground Girls of Kabul.

I read The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance In Afghanistan by Jenny Nordberg as part of the From Left to Write book Club. Nordberg discovers a secret Afghani practice where girls are dressed and raised as boys. Join From Left to Write on September 16th as we discuss The Underground Girls of Kabul. As a member, I received a copy of the book for review purposes.

This post originally appeared on Kate’s Point of View. © Kate. All rights reserved.