The Underground Girls of Kabul (25 page)

But where the legacy of determining inherent differences and traits in humans based on skin color has been thoroughly dismissed by now, the idea that baby boys and baby girls are born with entirely different brains that determine behavior as they grow up has dragged far into our time. There is however little scientific validation today for discrimination based on birth sex or gender, as no simple way to separate individuals by gender exists. To strictly
group individuals by traditional “male” or “female” traits, skills, or behavior from birth is no longer considered valid or acceptable in many educated societies, as research has shown that two people of the
same
sex are actually likely to be
more different
than a random man put next to a random woman.

The answer to the nature versus nurture question is less controversial than what some may want: What makes a person and a personality is in fact a
combination
of nature and nurture, in the brain’s development in the womb and life experiences that follow.

There is also a perfect twist: What is “natural,” in the sense of presumably being innate, is not the same as what might
feel
natural. Acts or behavior can feel “natural” to us after many years of performing them, because the brain has physically adjusted or developed in one particular direction.

In other words:
With time, nurture can
become
nature.

This is where science meets Shukria’s experience. For her, the male gender stuck to some degree, when her mind and body grew and those experiences formed her personality. She doesn’t need a neurologist or a psychologist to tell her what she already knows: “Becoming a man is simple. The outside is easy to change. Going back is hard. There is a feeling inside that will never change.”

Where she works, doctors exist for purposes of immediate survival. There are few mental health professionals in the country. Although Afghans commonly confess they suffer from anxiety from
living through near-constant war, few have had access to or have sought professional help. That would be shameful, and the few doctors who specialize in matters of the mind are busy taking care of those who have lost theirs entirely. Psychology is associated with run-down asylums where the
really
crazy people are kept, so they do not pose a danger to others. Just like other adult women with a history of
bacha posh
that may have gone too far who live as married women silently around Afghanistan, Shukria has so far only had herself to consult on her own psyche.

Her own opinion is clear: Her parents should never have made her a boy, since she ultimately had to become a woman. As a parent, Shukria takes great care to raise her daughter as a traditional girl and her two sons as boys. She would never allow her own daughter to switch.

S
HUKRIA BELIEVES THE
clear rules on exactly what constitutes masculinity and femininity in Afghanistan are the reason it was hard, but not impossible, for her to learn how to become a woman. She offers some of her own observations—none of which has any basis in science but that nonetheless helped her train herself: Men begin to walk with the right foot; women with the left. A man breathes from the abdomen. A woman from the chest. A male voice comes from the throat: “You have to go deeper to the right sound.” A female voice comes from just under the chin, with a lighter breath.

She stands up, demonstrating her manly walk: shoulders pulled back, taking big steps with arms swinging by her sides. She used to put her hand inside the pocket of her coat as she walked—a chest pocket, kind of. Like Napoléon.

“Do you think gender is all in your head, then?” I ask.

“I know it. It’s about how we grow up.”

“But are we not born with some things that set us apart? Other than the body?”

“No.” Shukria shakes her head insistently and points to herself.
“I have experienced this myself. You learn everything. It’s all in the mind and in the environment. How could you explain me, otherwise?”

Setareh turns to me, waiting for an answer to translate for Shukria. I shake my head. I don’t have one.

On this day, we are in a small, foul-smelling windowless room at the back of the restaurant where by now we have spent dozens of afternoons with Shukria. We are separated from the men, who are lying on thick carpets smoking hookahs and eating chicken kebabs on the other side of a thin wall.

Women rarely visit the restaurant, the nervous owner has explained. Once again, a storage room next to the men’s bathroom—there is none for women—has been made available to us. If a few black-covered guests were found in too close proximity to the men, it might ruin the entire establishment. But it is on Shukria’s way home from the hospital, and its “security” is excellent, she believes. She does not know, and neither do we, that a few months later, the air outside will be filled with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades directed at the neighboring U.S. Embassy.

The menu is in both Dari and English, possibly inspired by the embassy next door, and offers various choices of pizza:
“cispy,” “spaisee,” “tike,” “teen,” “soft
,
”
or, simply,
“amrican style.”
On most days, we stick to tea and cardamom cake.

I rise from the floor, to stand opposite Shukria.

“Okay, so make me into a man, then,” I say. “If you think a person can switch. Show me how it’s done. Teach me.”

Shukria looks at me for several seconds. Then she turns to Setareh. A stream of words come out; Setareh can hardly keep up with Shukria’s explanation.

She has watched me several times, she explains, in the hospital garden. Although I have been styled and persistently trained in discreet, womanly behavior by Setareh, people still stare at me as I stride by, taking big steps in my all-black coverage. They watch me not only because I am obviously a Westerner, Shukria points out. They look at
me because I walk around as though I “am the owner of everything.” I arrive everywhere without a husband or a father. And when we speak, Shukria has noted, I look her in the eyes, seeming neither shy nor emotional. I do not giggle—my laugh is more of a hoarse kind. And like a child, my face has no makeup and my wrists and hands carry no jewelry. Shukria looks at me again, quickly, before she turns back to Setareh, striking an apologetic tone. She asks that her exact words not be translated, as they may be too insulting.

But Setareh has already burst out in low laughter, gently passing the message along: “She says you are a man already. There is nothing she can teach you.”

Shukria

I
T WAS THE
most painful moment Shukria can recall. It was also the moment when she felt love for the first time. She knew then, at least to some degree, that she was a woman.

Giving birth made her certain there was something female in her, a confirmation that she did indeed have the body, and hopefully something more, of a woman. It came as a relief that she had perhaps not destroyed it altogether by being a man.

With all that she had tried to learn and observe—how to dress, how to behave, and how to speak—she finally would not have to worry that the other women would catch her slipping up.

She had the proof now: She was a mother. One of them. In all, she would have two sons and one daughter.

As for how children were created, it was not discussed much among her friends. No one wants to be known for knowing too much or seeming too willing to discuss anything to do with “the secret parts,” which is only one of the many ways Afghan women refer to their reproductive organs.

Sex is, by definition, illegal in Afghanistan: The marriage contract is what finally turns it into a permissible act between husband and wife. At times Shukria’s female friends joked about the unfortunate “chore” of being in bed with their husbands. About how everyone
knows “what men are like.” Some husbands wanted to do it more often; others insisted only on Afghanistan’s Thursday-night conjugal tradition, when the workweek is over and both men and women take extra care to wash and groom in advance of Friday prayers. But Shukria did not dare ask any of her friends about what was normal and how anything related to the secret parts was supposed to feel or function. None of her friends ever mentioned enjoying sex, either, though they had all been told there were women who did: whores, with unnatural and obscene desires. And of course foreign women—more or less the same category.

Shukria’s own particular issue always seemed much too strange to bring up as well. None of her women friends grew up as boys, and she could not exactly ask her old male friends, either, why it is that sex makes her feel like “a nothing.” She laughs nervously when she tries to describe it: “I cannot give my husband love as a woman. I tried, but I think I got a very low score in this. When he touches me, I don’t feel comfortable. I just don’t feel anything. I want to ignore him. When he gets excited, I cannot respond. My whole body reacts negatively.”

What actually makes her cringe is not the physical contact, but shame: It is not right for her to be in bed with a man, even though she is his wife. “I don’t have those feelings other women have for men. I don’t know how to explain this to you.…”

She looks at us and hesitates: “Sometimes it is very hard for me to be in bed with my husband because he is a man. I think I am also a man. I feel like a man myself, on the inside. And then I feel it is wrong, for two men to be together.”

So perhaps she is gay?

Shukria is not the least bit offended or embarrassed when after dancing around it for a while I finally just ask the question. She is almost sad to admit she feels no attraction to women, either. Avoiding them and cultivating a deep belief that they are the weaker sex brought no romantic allure for her. Being intimate with a woman would be wrong, too.

She is actually quite sure she prefers men over women in general:
“Men are strong, strict. Women are very sensitive. I understand men. I feel them very easily.”

M
Y QUESTION OF
whether Shukria, or other
bacha posh
, may automatically develop homosexual preferences by living as boys turns out to have been entirely misguided.

First of all, as Dr. Robert Garofalo, the expert in Chicago on development of gender, explains, growing up as a gender different from one’s birth sex does
not
by default translate to homosexuality in adult age. But perhaps most important, whether
bacha posh
become homosexual presupposes that women who live in Afghanistan have an opportunity to embrace, develop, or practice sexuality of
any
kind.

They do not.

In Afghanistan, sex is a means to an end, of adding sons to the family. But nowhere in that equation is a sexual orientation or preference a factor for women. Having sex with a husband in a forced marriage is an obligation—one fulfilled in order to have children. But when, or how, to have it is not a question of lust, willingness, or even conscious choice. To identify as either
heterosexual
or
homosexual
, and define what that means, can be very difficult for an Afghan woman, who is not even supposed to be at all
sexual
.

That any woman, anywhere in the world, is capable of being sexual is a fairly recent idea. Not until the 1950s, with the help of
research by Dr. Alfred Kinsey and others, did the idea that women’s sexuality is in many ways similar to that of men’s begin to take hold. Before that, a healthy woman, in Western literature and science, was an
asexual
woman.

A woman who showed tendencies of being at all interested in sex was often subject to treatment to cure this bothersome and dangerous predilection. The reproductive organs of women were thought to be at the root of trouble: In nineteenth-century Europe, contemporary literature documented
how a woman’s uterus could be surgically removed in order to stem any unruly and exaggerated sexual behavior.
This sentiment still forms the modern-day argument for female genital mutilation around the world: An asexual wife is always preferable in order to promote a stable family.

There is a contradiction, of course, in the fact that medical experts in nineteenth-century Europe, as well as many Afghan men and women today, insist that a woman can and should feel nothing sexually since she exists only for procreation. At the same time, they fear and suspect an underlying, explosive sexuality in women that must be contained. Once it is ignited, a woman’s sexuality might be impossible to control, so best not to encourage it in any way. Most discreet if convoluted conversations in Afghanistan about sex usually end there: Men are sexual; women, not so much—unless there is something horribly wrong with them, making it difficult, or even unlikely, for many Afghan women to explore their sexuality or develop any sort of preference.

Still, women’s sexuality, and sexual feelings, of course do exist in Afghanistan. But as with gender, they are convoluted and often do not correlate to how we have learned to describe them. Interestingly, the sexual feelings described by several young unmarried Kabul women I privately pressed on the forbidden topic were abstract and in soft focus. It is the opposite of porn: Their fantasies are not directed at men and do not include visualizations of sexual acts, but are described as more meditative; a fantasy while masturbating may include something about “heaven,” “beauty,” or just a sense of calm and pleasure. But the act of masturbating is not only hindered by shame and fear—in small quarters where children and parents often sleep together, a moment of privacy is often very hard to come by. A young woman is also often told that touching oneself too much below the waist in any way may endanger her virginity.

For a married woman, having recognized some sexuality of her own and having figured out how to touch herself may not translate to enjoying sex with her husband. On the male side, a Pashtun doctor in his thirties confirms that he, just like Dr. Fareiba, is often asked by men for advice on how to make sons, which is a pretext for discussing
sex. The conversations follow a similar pattern: While some men are interested in making their women “happy,” there is a fear that if women are made “too happy” they will fantasize about, or even turn to, men other than their husbands; they may develop an interest in sex and become uncontrollable. As for his own marriage, he states with confidence: “According to my opinion, how should I put this … before I come to the end, my wife should come to the end. It’s better if she can come to the end twice.”