Thanks for your comment (and sorry for my delay in response). Yes, I agree — the distribution of power in this particular vote was very disconcerting, as it would be in any disability-related social group, as you say with the Deaf/hearing example. It’s frustrating when a group of people, people who are very much in a privileged or dominant position, assume that they are so right. (And it very obviously upset most of us! And those who weren’t upset by the vote became upset by all the resulting commotion and meltdowns. It was a pretty disastrous evening.)

Our original NT moderator is, for the most part, usually understanding of such objections. (She’s actually HoH, which I think contributes to her understanding us better, especially from a sensory/info filtering perspective. All of us are pretty easily distracted.) However, it’s gotten to the point where sometimes the NT moderators outnumber the aspies, and the balance has negatively affected decision-making and how the club is run. I realize that any book club run under the auspices of a university medical center (like our club is) is bound to have these sorts of issues, but still… the club started off as a pseudo-safe haven, a sort of “aspie place” and has kind of transformed into a bunch of people with weird NT agendas.

To be fair to the NTs, though, things have gotten better and calmer the past couple weeks, and they’ve started to realize why we had the reaction we did. We still ended up reading Curious and finished it this past Thursday. And the aspies basically used the club as a space to bash the book (and audience reaction to it), so… that has been fun. And hopefully educational to those who voted for it.

I’m not Autistic. But as a Deaf woman, I would have real trouble feeling comfortable in a group where the disconnect between the way Deaf people perceive things and the way hearing people perceive things was that profound. Or where all the hearing people were in charge and none of the Deaf people.