Watching Mehran, age six, play football at her school in Kabul, you would think that being a girl in Afghanistan wasn’t so bad at all.

As she moves in and out of the game on the sparsely covered grass lawn, her expression of focus shifts to a satisfied grin when she finally gets to the ball. Barefoot in dusty sandals, she kicks it as hard as she can into the field. Her shirt hangs loosely over her pants, and her short, black hair spikes out in every direction. She’s messy now – dirty even – but she doesn’t much care. There is no need for Mehran to be pretty, or to appear “proper” or shy, as is required and expected of other Afghan girls, who refrain from too much physical activity in their demure dresses and all their hair carefully tucked in under head scarves.

This – to be one of the boys – is Mehran’s privilege.

Mehran is a bacha posh – the literal term translated from Dari for a girl “dressed like a boy” in Afghanistan, the country that the UN says is the worst in the world to be born a girl, and where the average life expectancy of a woman is 44 years. The bacha posh are the secret underground girls of this deeply conservative society, where men and boys hold almost all the privileges, and where the mother of a newborn girl is often greeted with disappointment for not having brought a son into the world.

MORE:   https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/22/girls-boys-afghanistan-daughters-raised-as-sons-puberty-bacha-posh