“Same-Sex” and “Opposite-Sex” 71male the first 50 years of her life to a continued attraction to females after her transi-
tion and a brief experimentation with men.
The reader is invited to examine Rawlins’s 1992 book Friendship Matters:
Communication, Dialectics, and the Life Course for or an exemplary summary and
synthesis of dialectical theory as applied to same- sex and other- sex friendship
dynamics. Dialectical theory focuses on the contradictions that permeate all close
personal relationships. Friends want to be connected to one another, and yet they
also desire autonomy and freedom. Friends want predictability in their friendships,
and yet they ironically also want novelty and a belief that their friend can surprise
them from time to time. For example, dialectical theory is a particularly potent the-
oretical framework when applied to the freedoms and constraints offered by pres-
ent- day technologies (Hall & Baym, 2011).
Summary Remarks and Future Directions
The reader might believe that an inordinate amount of valuable space in this chap-
ter has been devoted to critiquing the degree to which terms such as “same- sex”
and “opposite- sex” are still valid ways of writing and talking about friendship. It
is abundantly clear that the vast majority of friendship scholars still employ that
typology and apparently see nothing wrong with it, despite the fact that it categori-
cally excludes individuals who identify as third sex and many other members of
the transgender community. I admit I have been guilty of this in all but a few of my
publications.
I also admit that my use of the term “hackneyed” in the title of this chapter is a
misnomer. Technically, a hackneyed term or phrase is one that lacks significance
through having been overused. There is nothing in the definition of “hackneyed”
to suggest that the word or words in question are outdated and just plain incorrect,
which is what I am claiming. So even though the labels “same- sex” and “opposite-
sex” may be somewhat hackneyed in the sense that they are overused by friend-
ship scholars, I also believe the assumptions underlying those labels are incorrect
because not all friendships are either one or the other. After years of reflection,
I now know that my friendship with Susan was neither same- sex nor opposite- sex,
or even other- sex, but rather some beautiful blending of the wide range of gender
identities that we all have available to us. The fact that there are currently no other
options available, at least no options popularized in the academic literature, gives
one pause for thought.
Along similar lines, Rawlins made the following observation when echoing
Judith Butler’s (1990) concerns about binary conceptualizations of gender: “there
is nothing intrinsically natural about separating all human beings into two oppos-
ing categories on the basis of one physical attribute of their overall being- in- the-
world” (Rawlins, 2009, p. 125). An extension of that observation is that there is also