Corbett O'Toole was a keynote speaker at the 2025 PacRim International Conference on Disability. It was awesome; you should have been there. I love her so much, and I loved her keynote so much that I wanted to share it here, and got lucky because everyone said I could. :) Please scroll to the end to watch the video of her speaking. These are words we need to hear right now.  Aloha. I'm really happy to be here and I'm really sorry I can't be there in person. In addition to my other disabilities, I got long COVID, so I no longer am able to travel. I'm currently sitting out in the Arizona desert and wishing I was there with you in beautiful Hawaii. Today I've been asked to share my experiences on the disability rights movement. I just want to point out that I'm talking about the Disability Rights Movement, which is a movement that focused primarily on access, physical access, ramps and braille, et cetera, and was mostly run by white people with physical disabilities. And I'm not talking about the Disability Justice Movement, which is a movement that focuses on intersections of oppression and is led by disabled people of color. For more information about the disability justice movement, a good place to start is the Sins invalid website. When I was growing up in the 1950s, and yes, I am that old, I didn't know hardly any other disabled people, and the world was not accessible in any way to me or anybody else with a disability. So imagine my surprise when I was 22 years old and I moved to Berkeley, California, and suddenly I was surrounded by all these people with disabilities and the single most important shift that happened was inside me. I mean, my body didn't change, the environment didn't change, but suddenly I was with people who said, we deserve to be treated with respect. We deserve to not be discriminated against. A good example of this is when we went into a coffee shop. When I would go into a coffee shop by myself before I'd be worried about people staring, and if they said something inappropriate, I'd be all like, oh, it's all my fault. When I would go in with a group of disabled people who all loved who we are, loved being with each other, if something happened, we would just look at them and look at us and go. It's too bad they don't see how fabulous we are. 'cause we know we're fabulous. I see. You are fabulous. You see my fabulousness. We're good. That was a huge shift. We taught each other that we deserve to be treated well. We deserve to have access to healthcare, asks us to education, to employment, to our choice of families. We wanted all of that. But we knew that in order to have that, we didn't just have to change attitudes. We had to fight for our rights. Prior to 1973, I might have rights in one town or one state and not in another. But in 1973, section 504, just one sentence, in the Rehabilitation Act got passed by law. Unfortunately, in 19 77, 4 years later, it still hadn't been enforced. So I had rights, but I couldn't use them. What was I gonna do? So disabled people across the United States decided that they were going to protest in April if the regulations to enforce 504 were not signed. I was part of a group in San Francisco of over 100 disabled people, our families, friends, and support workers who moved into the federal building and stayed there for 26 days until those regulations to enforce 504 were signed. I learned a couple of valuable lessons from that time. One, nobody's gonna give us our rights. We have to know we deserve them. We have to fight for them. And sometimes that means protesting. And two, that to be successful, people with disabilities from a variety of disability communities and racial and ethnic communities and language communities have to come together for a common goal. We got the 504 regulations because we worked across differences towards the goal of getting the regulations, and that was a very important lesson for all of us.