I am making a claim about my diagnosis, and even if I have not actually called out attacks on autistic people, that would not disprove that claim. It is not actually a provable claim, any more than a claim like “I’m a Christian” or “I’m an atheist”. When making claims about one’s own mind, no proof is necessary.

I chose to point out that I have, in fact, mentioned it in the distant past solely to point out that I’m annoyed about having to defend myself on that specific fact in the first place, not to prove a point.

Now, as for not defending autistic people from every unreasonable attack recently, like I said, I am unaware of any occurring recently. Only an assertion of one having happened a week ago (supposedly) without even a link to the specific article or a quote of the alleged attack. Generally, when I see the topic come up, I nearly always comment on it, but until this comment section, I have not seen it come up on this site in a year or so. That’s not to say it hasn’t come up; only that I have remained unaware of it.

And, of course, “unreasonable” is subjective. Without knowing the specifics, I cannot judge for myself whether or not a given attack is unreasonable or even an attack on autism, rather than someone who—coincidentally—happens to have autism.

Now, rather than insist that I try to prove statements that were never that important to the point I was trying to make to begin with, why not just show me the evidence that I am missing so I can decide for myself whether or not to defend Stephen on that front? Given that the alleged attack happened only about a week ago, it should be rather trivial for someone to find it and present it here (especially compared to the 1+ years ago that I recall since the last time I recall the subject coming up on this site).

Generally, I don’t assume bad faith on anyone’s part in online discussions unless I have specific evidence of bad faith or general evidence of a history of bad faith by that person, and I would like for that to be reciprocated. However, I understand that not everyone feels that way, so I offered a reason for people to lean more towards good-faith. That’s all my mentioning of my autism was meant to be. My mentioning of previous defenses of autistic people (most of which were not on this site, so I am unwilling to put them here for privacy reasons, or a year old or older, so searching for them is not worth the effort if the other person shows no signs of offering any evidence at all) was not meant as an actual argument, either, but just an expression of my frustration over dealing with someone acting as though they know what’s in my head when that’s not even the main argument and doesn’t even matter that much!

As for the amount of evidence I require, any evidence will do, really. And I don’t think that’s unreasonable. One would just be a quote from this comment section with reasoning, and the other would be a link to or quote from the comment section of an article from a week ago. It’s really not that hard, so why has no one even tried?