A Lawsuit Threatens the Disability Protections I’ve Known My Whole Life

Like so many Americans, I’ve been trying to avoid social media lately. My brain feels fractured and frazzled trying to keep up with the headlines that are only escalating with red-alert alarm. I’m trying to stay informed, while moving slowly and sustainably, focusing on the good I can do right in front of me. But just after supper on a recent Thursday night, as my kid heads off to his bath and the dishwasher waits to be loaded, my thumb finds the Instagram icon on my phone, and I’m sucked away from the table and into a post that stops me cold: “Section 504 is Under Attack.”

When I reference Section 504 out in the world, most people I meet scrunch up their faces like they’re trying to recall the name of that one guy from that one movie. “Is that related to my kid’s 504 plan?” they sometimes ask. Even when they vaguely recognize the words, few have any idea what this tiny piece of legislation means, let alone its history. A mere 46 words that appear in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 504 essentially prohibits all entities that receive federal funding from discriminating against disabled people.

So yes, it is inextricably related to school 504 plans, but it goes far beyond that too. Not only was this law written to make sure that students with disabilities, from cerebral palsy to ADHD to a temporarily broken leg, are provided the reasonable accommodations they need to participate meaningfully in their school community, but it prevents a landlord from turning someone away just because they have low vision, an employer from refusing to hire a qualified applicant solely because that person uses a wheelchair, and hospitals from declining to provide interpreters for deaf patients. Like any law, it is not abided by perfectly. Far from it. But it is a serious attempt to create more equity for a population that has been historically excluded from society.

While this law permeates almost all corners of public life, most of us didn’t learn about it in our history books, and our social-studies teachers didn't know to teach us about the 504 Sit-In of 1977. Collectively and culturally, most Americans just don’t know the story of disability rights. Even as a young girl moving through my midwestern town in my hot-pink wheelchair, I didn’t realize that the familiar landscape greeting me in the 1990s was fundamentally shaped by radical activism and fierce advocacy. I was certainly influenced by absent or skewed disability representation in storytelling, isolating social stigma, and clunky access, but I was welcomed at my public school without question, given a key to the elevator. I rode buses with spots for wheelchairs and was able to get inside the public library, local hospital, and post office. Curb cuts and accessible parking spaces were built into the fabric of much of my community.

Read More: Judy Heumann Insisted That Disabled People Like Me Belong

The world I grew up in looked and felt profoundly different than the one disabled people experienced in the decades before me. In 1962, Ed Roberts applied and got into Berkeley, but when the school found out he had a disability – he survived polio as a child and relied on tools like a wheelchair, a breathing machine, and (at night) an iron lung to keep him alive – they tried to deny his admission. Around the same time in Oakland, Calif., Brad Lomax struggled to access public transportation. Every time he needed to go somewhere in the city, his brother had to carry him up the bus steps, then rush back outside to grab his wheelchair. On the other side of the country, Judy Heumann was making her own waves. After a grueling fight to be included in public K-12 education, Judy went to college in New York to become a teacher and excelled throughout the program until one final piece of red tape – a physical exam to ensure candidates were “healthy” enough to teach without being a danger to their students. The folks in charge refused to grant her the teaching certificate she earned, because they deemed her wheelchair a fire hazard. In Washington, D.C., high schooler Kitty Cone walked with a cane. The headmistress of her school created bizarre ways to segregate her from the rest of the students, and when Kitty rebelled against these rules, she was expelled.

Being shut out of public life were not unique experiences at this time. In fact, they were ubiquitous. Many people with disabilities couldn’t attend their schools, ride public transportation, or access their county courthouses. Many struggled to leave their houses because the curbs and crosswalks in their neighborhoods were entirely inaccessible. They could be kicked off a plane or out of a movie theater or restaurant, or not hired for a job, simply because of their disabilities. And a lot of them saw this as a rather normal and expected reality. This is how the world had been presented to them: disability as their own personal problem. A private burden for them and maybe their families to sort out. Often they were sent away to live in institutions, erased from the families and communities they were born into.

They’d been given a story that their lives did not matter, they were expendable, they didn’t belong. But Ed, Brad, Judy, and Kitty didn’t buy it. Instead, they and many others set to work putting a different story into the world – a new way of thinking about disability. While the rest of society located the problem in their paralyzed legs, their deafness, their low vision, their speech, their cognitive impairment, they shifted the focus and pointed to the built environments and social stigma as the problem we should be trying to fix. People started to gather around this new story, and it sparked a movement.

When I see the headline “Section 504 is Under Attack,” my gut reaction is annoyance with the account that posted it. This could not be true. And I don’t appreciate anyone using Section 504 to grab attention and spread unfounded panic. The post references a court case – Texas v Becerra – filed last year by attorneys general in 17 states, including my home state of Kansas. I immediately start searching for sources outside of social media, confident they’ll validate my instinct that we are under no such threat. I can’t find any major news outlets reporting on it, so I dig deeper until I find the actual complaint. I want to see with my own eyes what is and isn’t being attacked.

The legal jargon makes my eyes blur, but I try to track the argument. The plaintiffs are upset about the Biden Administration’s most recent additions to Section 504. While it’s not mentioned in the brief, these changes were based on comments from thousands of disabled people, advocacy groups, and stakeholders and included a range of additions. The plaintiffs’ prime concern, however, seems to hinge on the Biden Administration’s stipulation that “gender dysphoria … may be considered a physical or mental impairment,” which would grant these folks unique protections under disability law. For pages, the plaintiffs argue every which way that gender dysphoria was never intended to be, and is in fact excluded from being characterized as, a protected disability. Thirty-seven pages in, I’m picking up on a lot of what looks like transphobia (certainly worth resisting in its own right), but I don’t see the promised threats to Section 504 as a whole. And then, right there in bold letters, I see the heading: “Section 504 is Unconstitutional.” And an entirely different argument begins to unspool.

Read More: The Disempowering Experience of Flying as a Disabled Person

Section 504 was written into law in 1973, but the politicians at the time claimed they needed more time to review it before it could be enacted. It’s true, there was work to be done. They needed to nail down exactly what was meant with terms like “disability,” “program,” and “activity.” But after four years and three administrations, disabled activists were fed up. On April 5, 1977, as activists rallied in nine different cities across the country, Ed, Brad, Judy, and Kitty as well as Ron Washington, Hale Zukas, and so many other leaders of the movement led a group of 150 protesters into the San Francisco Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) building. What started as a peaceful protest turned into a nearly monthlong sit-in. The protesters refused to leave the building until the Secretary of HEW, Joseph Califano, agreed to sign off on enacting Section 504 without any changes.

The federal government worked very hard to shut the protest down. They claimed the disability activists were asking for too much. Too expensive! Impossible to implement! They cut off the protesters’ water supply and phone lines, so the protesters who knew American Sign Language started using it to communicate through the windows. Meanwhile, the protesters were actively supported by a wide coalition, from the congregants at Glide Memorial Church to the gay men of the Butterfly Brigade. The Black Panthers brought hot meals day after day. The mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, tried to deliver portable showers, soap, towels, and cream for pressure sores, but was turned away. Eight of the protesters went on a hunger strike to raise the stakes and illustrate the urgency of this cause. After 25 days, the protesters won the fight. Califano signed the regulations without revisions.

Forty-eight years later, the plaintiffs in Texas v Becerra argue that Section 504’s “universal scope unfairly surprises States by retroactively adding conditions to pre-existing federal spending programs.” I wonder what it means to be surprised by a law that’s been in place for nearly half a century. They claim it is coercive in that states lose all federal funding if they fail to comply with this law, and I think of all the imperfect or absent accommodations in all of the institutions I move through. I think how hard it must be to actually lose federal funding – how much these institutions must be already protected from these laws.

Read More: Women of the Year: 1977: Judith Heumann

My eyes catch on the words “burdened by”: “Section 504’s retroactivity means that Plaintiffs could not have known they would be burdened by the Rehabilitation Act’s requirements when they chose to participate in earlier federal programs.” Disabled people being a burden is a prominent, powerful theme running through so many harmful narratives of disability. The bodies that drag the whole seamless system down with their inability to comply and produce the way they are expected to. A fear that’s haunted me since I first started making friends, vigilantly watching for the moment I became a burden. And finally, the magic words tucked into their “DEMAND FOR RELIEF”: “Declare Section 504, 29 U.S.C. 794, unconstitutional.” And just below: “Issue permanent injunctive relief against Defendants enjoining them from enforcing Section 504.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was stunned. How is it possible that the language used in 2024 could be nearly identical to the words chosen by politicians in 1977? Too expensive. Impossible to implement. These people are asking for too much. If we meet these requests, we won’t be able to help others. I have no experience in politics. I am certain the job is harder than I can fathom. But also, how is it possible that after decades of time to problem solve, brainstorm, and strategize, the only revision to the bureaucratic script is to bury the ableism beneath transphobia? How is it possible that so many people in power seem to have such stunted imaginations, so little curiosity for how to build this world to include more of us? I find this particularly repugnant when imagination and curiosity are some of the most defining traits of the very groups at risk. In many ways, our survival has always depended on it.

As I hold my little phone in my hand, studying the language of the complaint, the room starts to spin. My husband walks by and sees right away – I am not OK. “You want me to take bedtime reading tonight?” he asks. I hate missing bedtime reading. I grab the side of my son’s top bunk, and drop down from my wheelchair, scooting onto the bottom mattress where he’s waiting for me. We snuggle as we read a couple of chapters from a Magic Treehouse book, and when we’re done, I have no idea what I’ve just read. I turn to my son. “What do you think a person should do when they feel really helpless, because someone else is in charge, and they’re not making good choices for everybody?” He took a short beat. “Kick them, probably.”

On April 28, 1977, the protesters packed up their things and left the HEW building as victors. In her triumphant speech, Kitty Cone cried out over the gathered crowd, "We showed strength and courage and power and commitment that we the shut-ins, or the shut-outs, we the hidden, supposedly the frail and the weak, that we can wage a struggle at the highest level of government and win!" I can hear her deliver this line in my head. It still makes me cry. The piece I find the boldest of all might be the deep-seated belief in our inherent belonging – a belief so unwavering that even as the protesters were deemed pitiable and expendable, they had the guts to demand their government create a world that reflects our value. I grew up in a much more accessible world, and it’s still hard for me to wrap my head around the audacity it took to pull this off.

The gains we’ve made have been hard-earned and slow, life-changing and not enough. No one ever claimed the project of creating a meaningfully inclusive world for disabled people would be easy. It certainly isn’t “efficient,” at least, not in the short term. Section 504 is older than the buses driving down our roads, older than many of the buildings we move through day after day, older than so many renovations made to hospitals and universities. And yet the doctors’ offices where I receive care have only started including accessible scales in the last few years. As of early this year, only 150 of the 472 subway stations in New York City were considered accessible. It would seem the 504 is already difficult to enforce. And yet, according to some powerful people, it still asks too much. 

The night I first learn about Texas v Becerra, I lie quietly next to my son, remembering my newfound goals to focus on the good I can do right in front of me. When I notice his body relax into sleep, I do my stealth roll off his mattress and pull myself back into my wheelchair. I post about the lawsuit, linking resources so people can learn what is happening. The next morning, I start talking with friends and family – many of whom never vote the same as me. None of them know anything about this litigation. All of us reach out to our attorneys general.

In the days that follow, the AG offices provide constituents conflicting or inaccurate information that seems to reveal a lack of cohesive understanding. Some tell concerned callers that the lawsuit has been paused, while lawyers working on the case confirm the judge has set a Feb. 25, 2025, deadline for the 17 states and U.S. government to submit their legal briefs to the court. Others insist the lawsuit won’t affect students’ 504 plans or take away rights from disabled people. The Attorney General of South Carolina, whose name is on the complaint, releases a statement, saying, “there’s no way I would ever do anything to take away accommodations for anyone with a disability.” It’s hard to understand what these statements mean, given the language in the lawsuit is clear and direct about its aims.

In many ways, Section 504 has operated as an almost invisible protection – easy to take for granted. And in doing so, we’ve been able to continue the fiction that disability is something that happens only to others. The undeniable fact is that every one of us will acquire a disability if we live long enough. Disability is an experience we can move in and out of over the course of our lives, and disabled people are the only minority group anyone can become a part of at any moment. Section 504 is not a law for “those people.” The disabled protesters went to battle for a law that looks after all of us, even the bureaucrats opposing it all along the way. No matter how Texas v Becerra unfolds, this won’t be the last attack on disability rights in the near future. Even in the last few days, five major airlines asked an appeals court to “hold unlawful and set aside” a recent Department of Transportation rule designed to make air travel safer and more dignified for disabled passengers. Regardless, our concerns should not be satiated as soon as our own group’s threats are momentarily alleviated. If we’ve learned anything from the unlikely victory of the underdogs in the Section 504 Sit-In, it’s that marginalized groups survive when we show up for each other.

As with much of U.S. politics right now, Texas v Becerra feels like a reckless attempt to pull us back to a former time. But there is one crucial difference between 1977 and 2025. More than one generation of disabled children has grown up under the protections Section 504 provides us. And while the politicians are still reciting the same script, our revolutionary predecessors gave us a new story. We are a valuable part of our communities, we belong here, and we’ve been shown how to fight.