Katie Dudtschak was not comfortable being a boy from the time she was five years old. She remembers spending hours rummaging through her mother’s jewelry box and clothes drawers, putting on her sister’s bra and panties and wearing them under her clothes to play outside — preferring skipping with the girls to soccer with the boys.

Maryam Said Anwar’s says her body still bears the scars from the beatings with a screwdriver she endured at the hands of her husband. Forced to marry when she was 13, Anwar says she was drugged, beaten and tortured by her husband. “Even as l lay full of pain and blood on the ground, he would hit my face and remove my nails with heavy-duty pliers.”

Glenda’s voice falters as she remembers the day her son was laid-off from his airline job and her taxi business was shuttered.

Ahmed Fadozai can still remember the moment the knife was plunged into the man’s neck.Fadozai, now an entrepreneur in Houston, was in Kabul’s Ghazi soccer stadium in 1998, waiting to watch a soccer match with friends. Instead, military trucks rolled in, soldiers jumped out, hoisted up a man and then decapitated him.

Warning: This story contains descriptions of violence.