Johnson Progress

For more than ten years, Sitara Wafadar has worn her brother’s clothes except she never had a brother.

Instead, the 18-year-old from Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province has lived almost her entire life as a boy, part of a centuries-old practice known as bacha posh that allows families without sons to send a daughter into the world with a measure of the freedom and safety only males are granted.

Sitara is one of six sisters.

With five sisters and no brothers, her family turned to the tradition a Dari term meaning “dressed as a boy” so she could safely carry out the duties normally reserved for a son in Afghanistan’s patriarchal society.

She lives with her family in a mud-brick home and, alongside her elderly father, works six days a week at a local brick factory to help pay off debts and feed the household.

The disguise has become second nature.

Speaking at the kiln where she labors, she insists the identity feels real to her now. “I never think that I am a girl,” she told AFP.

Bacha posh is not unique to Sitara’s family. The custom runs deep in conservative Afghanistan, where families with no male heir often dress a daughter as a boy so she can move through public life without facing harassment or worse and some girls choose the role themselves simply to claim the freedoms their male peers take for granted in a country that treats women as second-class citizens.

Most girls abandon the disguise once they reach puberty, but Sitara has kept wearing men’s clothing well past that point, largely for self-protection at the brick kiln.

Her father, identified as Noor, has embraced her role in the family, treating her as his eldest child in every sense including at solemn occasions.

“My father always says ‘Sitara is like my eldest son.’ Sometimes I attend funerals as his eldest son,” she said a role she would be barred from as a girl.

Human rights researchers say the practice has taken on new urgency since the Taliban’s return to power.

Restrictions barring women and girls from appearing in public without a male guardian have made bacha posh children more valuable than ever to their families, since even a young boy can serve as that required escort.

Aid workers and mental health counselors in the country report encountering the practice frequently, describing parents who dress daughters as boys specifically to shield them from scrutiny and allow them to work or run errands for the household.

The custom is temporary by design; children are expected to resume life as girls once they mature, a transition that counselors say is not always easy after years of living otherwise.

But for families like Sitara’s, the arrangement remains less about defying tradition than surviving within it a workaround born of necessity in a society where a household without a son is still widely seen as incomplete.

Her story, along with similar accounts emerging from across Afghanistan, has renewed global attention on the barriers girls face in accessing education, safety, and basic mobility and on the lengths families go to protect their daughters’ futures within those constraints.