Review of The Underground Girls of Kabul: In search of a hidden resistance in Afghanistan by Jenny Nordberg

This book provides a revealing look at females living as males in Afghanistan. Families with only girl children may designate one of the girls to be a boy. She will be dressed in boy's clothing and allowed to interact with outsiders as a boy. She will have much more freedom in movement and contact with boys and men than her sisters will. Girls (and women) have very little status in Afghanistan. Designating a child to be a male gives a woman more status to the outside world. Women with only female children risk the threat of having their husbands take a second wife so that the family will have a male heir.
Many of these girls will revert to being a female when they reach puberty and are of marriageable age. But some remain in their status as males to the outside world because it gives them much more freedom. Since they have grown up being able to speak and think for themselves they don't want to give this up.
Afghanistan is not the only country in which the practice of dressing girls as boys is done. It has been done in places where the status of women is low. The author states that the situation of women in these places will only change when men support women having equal status and rights.