Reddit reviews The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan

I'm reading a very interesting and pretty relevant to this book called The Underground Girls of Kabul. It's about a phenomenon in Afghanistan where if a family has no sons, they sometimes decide to dress a daughter up as a boy and pretend she is a boy (this is called "bacha posh"). This is because in the culture of the country women are effectively seen as having no value unless they are able to bear sons, and therefore there is a lot of pressure on the family to have sons to present to the world. It's a practice that is in a lot of ways tacitly accepted, even though it seems to go against the strict gender roles of the society.



Through the author's research she found that girls who dressed up as boys during their young childhood but changed back before puberty seemed to adapt to womanhood just fine. However, women who for whatever reason went through puberty while remaining a boy, and only "changed back" to being women at say, age 20, it seemed they could never fully adapt to being "natural women." They reported "feeling like a man" on the inside even when older. Of course Afghanistan is a culture with VERY strict separation of men's and women's roles, and women are even discouraged from, say, walking on the street alone, so it is a huge shift in behavior.



One of the women argues in the book that even sets of habits we think are set in stone, like gender, have all just come out of the habits we've formed and the environments we are raised in. This woman grew up learning to blend in as a boy, and then suddenly had to change that and learn to blend in as a woman. But she doesn't think she was actually predisposed to either behavior set, that it was all based on context. And there is a good amount of research to support that nurture can almost "create" nature, that habits that seem natural to us are actually just formed.



Anyways, this is why I agree with the above post--you shouldn't label yourself "the kind of person that does X" because being "that kind of person" is likely very strongly a result of your environment and culture. Even in terms of something as strong as gender, and definitely in terms of habits like your fitness level. We are all more fluid than we think... we shouldn't be afraid to try removing ourselves from all context whenever we can (this is why I like long-term travel!)