The ideas in this essay were first explored in a talk I gave at the 7th Global Congress on Gender and Sexuality Studies (Rich-Tolsma, 2025). I share them here in a more accessible format for those working in group facilitation, education, therapy, or community practice who are trying to hold space for justice, dignity, and recognition in difficult times.
A Moment of Backlash, A Moment of Reckoning
We are living through a moment of backlash. Across North America and Europe, trans rights, once framed as signs of progress, are now under threat. In the United States, healthcare access for trans people is being restricted, and the language of diversity and inclusion is being systematically removed from institutional policy. In Europe, far-right movements have positioned trans visibility as a threat to national identity, incorporating it into broader anti-gender ideologies.
This backlash is not only political. It enters the room. It shows up in classrooms, board meetings, therapy groups, and everyday conversations. Even in spaces that describe themselves as inclusive, the recognition of trans people often remains partial, conditional, and emotionally costly.
In this blog, I explore one such moment: a rupture in a therapy group that illustrates how misrecognition emerges not only through explicit exclusion, but through silence, fragility, and the patterned distribution of relational power.
The Group and the Field
The group I reflect on here was part of a long-term community mental health project. It was a free-associative analytic group: a space where people came together without fixed agenda, and where meaning emerged through the relational and unconscious dynamics of the group itself.
Group analysis, as developed by S. H. Foulkes (1975), invites us to see the group as more than a collection of individuals. It has its own memory, emotional register, and symbolic body. It is shaped by what Foulkes called the matrix: a web of conscious and unconscious connections, formed through participants’ histories, transference, projections, and shared cultural assumptions. Daniel Anderson (2020) extends this idea, suggesting that the group functions as a shared body, one that absorbs, enacts, and sometimes resists tensions that have not yet been named.
In this group, Femke, a white, working-class trans woman, had been participating for several months. She was known and respected. There had been no incidents of overt hostility. Yet the dynamics remained layered.
A Moment of Misrecognition
One afternoon, a participant named Frans, a cisgender man in his late fifties, offered a personal reflection. “I used to think gender was just about anatomy,” he said. “But after getting to know Femke, I see things differently now.”
His tone was gentle and even appreciative. He presented his comment as a story of learning. But something shifted in the room. Femke’s shoulders tensed. There was a pause before she responded. And then came the silence. It was not a silence of reflection; it was a silence of avoidance. The group moved on, as if the moment had not happened.
To some, this might have seemed too small to notice. But for Femke, and for those attuned to these dynamics, it was not small at all.
Reading the Silence
This kind of silence is rarely empty. In analytic terms, it is a form of group communication. Wilfred Bion (1961) proposed that groups sometimes adopt unconscious assumptions to manage anxiety. These may manifest as dependency, idealisation, or avoidance. In this case, the silence may have functioned as a subtle form of flight from discomfort. More than that, it was also a mirror. It reflected a familiar pattern that many trans people encounter: being present, but not fully recognised.
Femke later described the moment as familiar. She had encountered this silence before: in classrooms, family gatherings, and in so-called inclusive institutions. It was not overt exclusion. It was the soft expectation that she would manage the discomfort of others. That she would quietly affirm someone else’s sense of progress without revealing her own hurt or fatigue.
The Double Bind of Fragility
When Femke later named the discomfort she had felt in that moment, the group responded in a familiar sequence. Frans became defensive, then tearful, and then apologetic. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said. “Can you explain what I did wrong so I don’t do it again?”
What had begun as Femke’s attempt to articulate harm quickly shifted into an emotional demand. Now she was being asked to reassure the person who had caused the rupture. Sara Ahmed (2012) describes this pattern in her work on affective economies. Emotional labour is redistributed in ways that centre the feelings of those with structural power.
Femke found herself in a double bind. If she softened her response, she risked disappearing. If she remained firm, she risked being read as unreasonable. Her choice was between authenticity and acceptability.
Conducting the Group: An Ethical Intervention
As the conductor of the group, I had a decision to make. I could allow the dynamic to continue. I could let the silence hold the weight. Or I could speak.
To intervene is never a neutral act. It disrupts the group’s defences. It shifts the rhythm of the exchange. It introduces a new layer of transference. And it brings the risk of becoming the object of discontent.
Still, I chose to intervene. I named what I had observed: not only between Frans and Femke, but within the group as a whole. I reflected on how often trans participants are asked to absorb, explain, and contain the discomfort of cisgender uncertainty. I wondered aloud about the silence, what it protected, and at what cost.
Something shifted. Slowly, others began to speak. They named their hesitations. They acknowledged their discomfort. And they turned toward Femke. Not to ask her to educate them, but to witness what had happened.
This was not a dramatic rupture. It was a quiet realignment. But it marked a move from what Bion called basic assumption functioning to a more reflective working group state: a capacity to sit with complexity rather than avoid it.
Redistributing the Work of Recognition
This moment raised a central question: who carries the burden of recognition? Who is responsible for repair?
Miranda Fricker (2007) describes epistemic injustice as a harm that occurs when someone is not recognised as a legitimate knower. In group contexts, this often plays out as a demand that marginalised participants explain and translate their experiences for others. Femke had done this work many times before.
The work of recognition, including the emotional, interpretive, and relational labour it requires, could not be hers alone. It had to be shared. By the group. By me as conductor. And, more broadly, by the institution that convened the space.
Nancy Fraser (2009) reminds us that recognition without redistribution is an empty gesture. It may appear inclusive on the surface, but it leaves underlying structures intact.
Staying with the Trouble
Donna Haraway (2016) offers a compelling ethic: staying with the trouble. Rather than rushing to resolution, she invites us to remain present with difficulty. To inhabit contradiction. To resist the pull toward premature closure.
In group life, this means allowing discomfort to surface. It means sitting with the unsayable. It means treating rupture not as failure, but as an opportunity to name what has been held beneath the surface.
Femke’s experience, and the group’s eventual turn toward her, remind us that recognition is not a matter of goodwill alone. It is about the patterning of power relations. It is about who is heard, who is protected, and who is expected to carry the cost of transformation.
And it reminds us that something else is possible. When we speak. When we stay. When we share the weight.
Let’s Stay in the Conversation
If this reflection resonates with you, if you are working with group dynamics, facilitation, or institutional culture and want support thinking through the ethics of recognition, I would be glad to connect.
You can reach out to me at rich-tolsma.art, or contact me directly to begin a conversation.
Let’s keep returning to the questions that matter.
References
Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press.
Anderson, D. (2020). The Group as a Body: Social Dreaming and the Practice of Psychoanalytic Group Therapy. Phoenix Publishing House.
Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in Groups. Tavistock Publications.
Fraser, N. (2009). Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. Columbia University Press.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
Foulkes, S. H. (1975). Group Analytic Psychotherapy: Method and Principles. Gordon and Breach.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Rich-Tolsma, M. (2025, March 10–11). Rupture and recognition: Gendered power, misrecognition, and transformation in group interactions. Paper presented at the 7th Global Congress on Gender and Sexuality Studies, Sciinov Group, online. https://genderstudycongress.com/edition2/