Girls Will Be Boys

"People in glass houses shouldn't throw stone."

There are no glass houses in Afghanistan, but there are stonings for a wide variety of social offenses. Adultery is the most common, however woman are under constant threat for such trivial trespasses as leaving the house without a male family member or showing their face or attending school or reading any book other than the Koran. To combat this iniquity many families without sons transgender a daughter by cutting her hair short, dressing her in boy's clothing. These bacha posh are accepted as boys within their family and village, until they reach the age of puberty. Many of these boy-girls are reported to transformation back to their natural gender.

The 2003 film OSAMA explored this unknown territory of gender alchemy and a present member of the Afghani parliament spent a good portion of her youth as a bacha posh and says, "I think it made me more energetic. It made me more strong."

I was subjected to opposite treatment as a baby. My mother expected a girl. No one knew the sex of a fetus in 1952, except maybe a gypsy and my mother was a devout Catholic. The nursery was furnished with pink clothing. The walls painted the same color. After a long labor the doctor said to my mother, "Congratulations, you have a baby boy."

She accepted my sex and named me after her father, a trolley inspector for Boston's MTA working out of the Forest Hill terminal. My parents came home and decided that while I was a boy that it was silly to waste the girl's infant clothing and for the first six months of my life I was a boy-girl. There was no word for it in Gaelic, at least I never heard it from Nana, my grandmother, and she spoke her native tongue ever so sweetly.

Of course I'm sure that there are gaybashers who can comment harshly on my infantile transvestitism or Taliban commanders dying to stone a young girl, however as they say in Connacht, "Póg mo thóin!"

Simply translated, "Kiss my ass."