Miina is very shy, but she admitted to a yearning to look like a girl. She still likes to borrow her sister’s clothing when she is home. She is also nervous that she will be found out if one of her classmates recognizes her at the store. “Every day she complains,” said her mother. “ ‘I’m not comfortable around the boys in the store,’ she says. ‘I am a girl.’ ”

Her mother has tried to comfort her by explaining that it will be only for a few years. After all, there are others to take her place. “After Miina gets too old, the second younger sister will be a boy,” her mother said, “and then the third.”

Refusing to Go Back

For most such girls, boyhood has an inevitable end. After being raised as a boy, with whatever privileges or burdens it may entail, they switch back once they become teenagers. When their bodies begin to change and they approach marrying age, parents consider it too risky for them to be around boys anymore.

When Zahra, 15, opens the door to the family’s second-floor apartment in an upscale neighborhood of Kabul, she is dressed in a black suit with boxy shoulders and wide-legged pants. Her face has soft features, but she does not smile, or look down, as most Afghan girls do.

She said she had been dressing and acting like a boy for as long as she could remember. If it were up to her, she would never go back. “Nothing in me feels like a girl,” she said with a shrug.

Her mother, Laila, said she had tried to suggest a change toward a more feminine look several times, but Zahra has refused. “For always, I want to be a boy and a boy and a boy,” she said with emphasis.

Zahra attends a girls’ school in the mornings, wearing her suit and a head scarf. As soon as she is out on the steps after class, she tucks her scarf into her backpack, and continues her day as a young man. She plays football and cricket, and rides a bike. She used to practice tae kwon do, in a group of boys where only the teacher knew she was not one of them.