60 Who Are Our Friends?
transgenderism in my classes, she would describe herself as “not a woman in the
traditional sense, and certainly no longer a man, and but rather a two- spirited, sur-
gically engineered hybrid.” As a participant in our friendship, I engaged in many
gender- neutral activities with Susan, but we also were involved in traditionally mas-
culine enterprises. My roles as both participant and observer led to many personal
musings, musings that some qualitative methodologists claim have clear relevance
to this chapter because they are personal (Lofland & Lofland, 1995).
One such musing was silently speculating to myself about the type of
friendship I was in. After all, I had spent the last 17 years of my professional
life writing about friendship and had published a book on opposite- sex friend-
ship (Monsour, 2002). I curiously asked myself, “Is this a same- sex friendship
or an opposite- sex one?” There was compelling evidence supporting both per-
spectives. Susan provided me with the highly valued “insider perspective” that
men frequently mention as the most important advantage of an opposite- sex
friendship (Monsour, 2002). She gave me a window into what it was like to be
a woman in a male- dominated society. On the flip side, Susan and I loved to
watch over- the- top testosterone- laden action movies— the kinds of movies that
I had watched my entire adult life with my same- sex friends but never with my
female ones. Although I leaned toward viewing the relationship as an opposite-
sex friendship rather than a same- sexed one, neither label was a particularly good
fit. Both were limiting and overly prescriptive. I began to wonder why friendship
scholars, myself included, had locked all of us into a strict typological binary in
which all friendships had to be either same- sex or opposite- sex. Why could they
not be something different?
Ultimately, the lived experience of my friendship with Susan prompted me to
write the following in a chapter on gender and friendship:
Because postoperative transgenders might constitute a third gender, or at
least one that transcends the traditional masculine and feminine categories
(Bolin, 1994), researchers and theoreticians should devote more time and
energy investigating a community that could possibly serve as a catalyst for
a paradigm shift in how gender is conceptualized.
(Monsour, 2006, p. 65)The reader might be puzzled as to where I am going with these introductory
remarks. Before I embark on my primary task of identifying current knowledge
and future directions in the area of adult same- sex and opposite- sex friendships,
it is important to explain from the outset where I am coming from, how my per-
sonal experience informs my professional persona. The categories of same- sex
and opposite- sex friendships bother me on both personal and professional levels.
Consequently, in writing this chapter I find myself, in the words of the qualitative
researchers Lofland and Lofland, “starting from where I’m at,” that is, writing about