The Underground Girls of Kabul - Jenny Nordberg

⭐ 9.0/10

(Originally written by Magdalene)

Journalist Jenny Nordberg is interviewing a female politician in Afghanistan when she meets her son, who turns out to be a daughter dressed as a boy. This introduces her to the phenomenon of bacha posh, when families, usually ones with no sons, pass a daughter off as a boy for social clout, so that the women in the family can go out with a male chaperone, to have someone else who can make money, or other reasons. So Nordberg sets off to see if she can find other bacha posh and understand this phenomenon in a country with such rigid ideas of gender and strict gender segregation.

This book was so fascinating, but also... quite depressing. Things in Afghanistan are NOT GOOD. The author explores the subject through lots of different angles, and whenever it was about politics and foreign aid it was so discouraging I sometimes had to fast-forward. I personally enjoyed most the chapters about gender expression, gender identity, and whether it's more nature or nurture. She focuses on about six different bacha posh, who all dressed as boys for different amounts of time and had very different experiences. Even though it's about something that happens to a fairly small amount of people in a small part of the world, it has a lot of insight into a different culture and humans in general.