Beyond the ADA: The Paradigm Shift to Disability Justice

Presentation Script — ODC ADA Celebration, July 2026

Todd Woodward, Oregon Disabilities Commissioner, Lane County

[SLIDE 1: Title Slide — “Beyond the ADA: The Paradigm Shift to Disability Justice”]

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Todd Woodward. I’m an Oregon Disabilities Commissioner representing Lane County, and I’m Autistic.

I want to start with something that might feel uncomfortable for an ADA celebration: The ADA is not enough. It was never going to be enough. And I think most of us already know that in our bodies, even if we haven’t had the language for it yet.

Today I want to walk through why that’s the case, where the disability rights framework breaks down, and what disability justice offers us as an alternative. Not a replacement for the ADA. An evolution beyond it.

”Moving from compliance and independence to collective liberation and interdependence” is the trajectory I want to trace for you over the few minutes.

[SLIDE 2: “The Milestone: A Foundation of Civil Rights”]

So let’s start with what the ADA actually did, because it matters and it was real.

The ADA was signed into law on July 26, 1990. Thirty-six years ago this month. It established a legal baseline protecting disabled people from discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and government services. Before the ADA, you could refuse to hire someone because they used a wheelchair. You could refuse to serve someone because they were Deaf. There was no federal recourse. The ADA changed that, and the people who fought for it, many of them putting their bodies on the line in protests and direct actions, deserve our recognition.

But here’s what I need you to sit with: the ADA’s vision was built on an equality-based model. The idea was, remove the architectural barriers, remove the communication barriers, and disabled people can compete on equal footing. The logic was: if we level the playing field, everyone can participate.

The problem is that formal legal equality assumes a level playing field actually exists underneath the barriers. And for a lot of us, it doesn’t. It never did.

[SLIDE 3: “The Cracks in the Foundation”]

Let’s focus on just three cracks in the foundation.

First: the carceral pipeline. Disabled BIPOC experience police violence and institutionalization at rates that the ADA was never designed to address. The ADA can tell a courthouse to install a ramp. It cannot dismantle the system that funnels disabled Black and brown people into jails and institutions. Those are different problems requiring fundamentally different tools.

Second: economic exclusion. Right now, in 2026, disabled workers in many states can still be legally paid subminimum wages under Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Most of these workers earn less than $3.50 an hour. Oregon eliminated 14(c) use years ago, so we sometimes forget this is still happening nationally. And it almost changed at the federal level: the Department of Labor proposed phasing out 14(c) certificates in late 2024, but withdrew that proposed rule in July 2025. So the federal government looked at this practice, acknowledged it was outdated, and then decided to keep it anyway. The ADA says you can’t discriminate in employment, but it coexists with a law that says you can pay disabled people pennies. That contradiction isn’t accidental.

Third: systemic erasure. Disabled undocumented immigrants. Disabled queer and trans BIPOC. People who can’t afford lawyers. People who don’t speak English. The ADA’s enforcement mechanism is civil litigation. If you can’t access the courts, the ADA functionally doesn’t exist for you.

The bottom line: a compliance-based framework built for a capitalist, white-centered system cannot reach the people who live at the intersections of multiple oppressions. It was built to work within the system, not to question it.

[SLIDE 4: “The Paradigm Shift: Two Different Operating Systems”]

There is a fundamental difference between disability rights and disability justice: Two fundamentally different operating systems.

Under disability rights, the primary mechanism is litigation, compliance, and legal rights. Under disability justice, it’s community care, interdependence, and collective action.

Under disability rights, leadership has historically centered white, physically disabled, middle-class perspectives. The disability rights movement was built largely by and for a specific demographic. Under disability justice, leadership is centered on queer and trans BIPOC and multiply-marginalized people, because those are the people who know these systems most intimately.

The goal of disability rights is independence and access to existing systems. Get in the door. Prove you belong. Disability justice asks a different question entirely: Why are we trying to get into systems that were designed to exclude us? The goal is interdependence and the total transformation of those systems.

On capitalism: disability rights operates within capitalism by emphasizing assimilation, by asking disabled people to prove their “productivity.” Disability justice names capitalism itself as a problem, insisting that human worth exists entirely outside of what you can produce.

And on the state: disability rights sees the state as a protector and enforcer. Disability justice recognizes the state as a frequent instrument of carceral harm. Both of those things can be true at the same time, and holding that tension is part of what makes this shift so difficult for people working inside government. I work for the state. I sit on a state commission. I hold this tension every day.

[SLIDE 5: “Ableism is the Linchpin”]

Ableism is not a parallel system of oppression running alongside racism and classism and transphobia. Ableism is the central mechanism that validates and enables the others.

Think about it this way. The state relies on ableism to sort bodies and minds into categories of “valuable” and “not valuable,” “productive” and “not productive.” That sorting logic, that hierarchy of who deserves to live and thrive and who doesn’t, is the same logic that drives racism, classism, and transphobia. Ableism gives those systems their justification.

Patty Berne, one of the founders of disability justice and the co-founder of Sins Invalid, has written about how all of our bodies are caught up in interconnected systems of ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation-state, and imperialism. You can’t pull those apart. They operate together. And ableism is the gear at the center that keeps all the others turning.

This is why disability justice insists on cross-movement solidarity. You can’t fight racism without fighting ableism. You can’t fight for queer liberation without fighting ableism. The fights are structurally connected, not just rhetorically connected.

And you can’t fight what you refuse to name, which is why our Commission last year advised Governor Kotek to address it.

[SLIDE 6: “The Birth of Disability Justice”]

Disability justice as a named framework was developed in 2005 by a group now known as the Disability Justice Collective. The founding members were Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Stacey Milbern, Leroy F. Moore Jr., Eli Clare, and Sebastian Margaret.

They are disabled queer women of color, disabled queer and trans people, disabled people of color. This was not an accident. Disability justice was born specifically because the existing disability rights movement, for all its accomplishments, failed to address ableism as it intersected with race, gender, and sexuality. The disability rights movement’s leadership was too white, too straight, too focused on physical disability, too middle-class.

Disability justice is a second-wave corrective. It defines disability outside of white, male, or straight terms. It came from the people that the first wave left behind.

And the through-line, the idea that runs through everything I’m going to say from here on: we are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them.

[SLIDE 7: “A Framework for Collective Liberation”]

The 10 Principles of Disability Justice function not as a checklist, but as an interconnected ecosystem. I’ve organized them here into three zones, and I want to be clear that this is one way of organizing them, not the only way. The principles feed into and reinforce each other.

Domain 1 is “Who Centers the Work,” the roots. This is about grounding in lived experience and wholeness.

Domain 2 is “How We Fight,” the network threads. This is about solidarity against systemic exploitation.

Domain 3 is “How We Care,” the canopy. This is about creating sustainable ecosystems of support.

Let me walk through each zone.

[SLIDE 8: “Domain 1: Who Centers the Work”]

Three principles here.

Intersectionality. Audre Lorde said we do not live single-issue lives. Disability intersects with race, class, and gender in ways that can’t be separated. A white wheelchair user and a Black Autistic woman navigating the same system have fundamentally different experiences. Disability justice insists that we hold all of those realities at once.

Leadership of those most impacted. This is the principle that challenges the most people, in my experience. It says that the people who know oppressive systems best, disabled queer and trans BIPOC and multiply-marginalized people, are the ones who should lead, because they hold the creative strategies for resistance. Not consultants. Not allies. The people whose lives are on the line.

Recognizing wholeness. Human worth is inherent. It doesn’t depend on what you produce, what you earn, or how closely you match a normative standard. You don’t have to justify your existence through economic output. That shouldn’t be a radical statement, but under capitalism, it is.

[SLIDE 9: “Domain 2: How We Fight”]

Three more principles.

Anti-capitalist politic. Disability justice names capitalism directly as a system that treats land and humans as raw material for profit. It refuses the demand to conform to “normative” productivity. If you can’t work a 40-hour week, capitalism says you’re broken. Disability justice says capitalism is the thing that’s broken.

Cross-movement solidarity. Disability justice aligns with racial justice, reproductive justice, prison abolition, and queer liberation. These aren’t side causes or nice-to-haves. They’re structurally connected. You can’t dismantle one gear while leaving the others spinning. This is why ONEC, the Oregon Neurodivergent Equity Collaborative that I’m building, names cross-movement solidarity as a core operating principle. We learned it here.

Cross-disability solidarity. This one is about breaking down the silos that separate physical disability from chronic illness from neurodivergence from psychiatric survivorship. Ableism doesn’t respect those categories. Our resistance shouldn’t either.

[SLIDE 10: “Domain 3: How We Care”]

The last four principles.

Sustainability. This is about honoring the teachings of our bodies. Pacing ourselves. Rejecting capitalist urgency in favor of deep, long-term movement building. Burnout is not a badge of honor. It’s a sign that we’ve internalized the very system we’re trying to dismantle.

Interdependence. Meeting each other’s needs through community support rather than relying on state solutions that extend control over our lives. I’ll come back to this one on the next slide.

Collective access. Creating flexible, creative ways of sharing responsibility for access needs that go beyond what able-bodied norms assume. Access isn’t a checklist. It’s a living practice that changes as our communities change.

Collective liberation. A vision that leaves no bodymind behind. And I use the word “bodymind” intentionally, because it refuses the split between physical and cognitive experience that Western thinking takes for granted. Our bodies and our minds are not separate systems. They never were.

[SLIDE 11: “From Isolation to Interdependence”]

Independence, on the left, is a colonial, capitalist myth. It isolates us. It demands hyper-productivity. It frames needing help as a failure. The entire disability rights movement was built around the word “independence,” and I understand why. In the 1970s and 1980s, the alternative was institutionalization. Independence meant getting out. It meant survival. I don’t diminish that.

But interdependence, on the right, is what comes next. It’s the recognition that we all share one planet and survive by meeting each other’s needs. Nobody is actually independent. Not the CEO, not the senator, not the nondisabled person who thinks they don’t need anyone. Everyone depends on other people’s labor, care, and presence. The question is whether we acknowledge that or pretend otherwise.

In an interdependence framework, access becomes a shared, evolving responsibility. It’s not something you request from an institution and hope they grant. It’s something communities build together, continuously.

[SLIDE 12: “Cross-Movement Threats in Real Time”]

I want to bring this down to the present moment, because disability justice isn’t an abstraction.

Right now, ableism is being actively weaponized to roll back civil rights across multiple communities.

Legal battles like Texas v. Becerra are attempting to strip gender dysphoria from ADA and Section 504 protections. They are weaponizing disability law against transgender people. This should concern every disabled person, whether or not you are trans, because it demonstrates that our legal protections are only as strong as the political will to enforce them. And right now, that will is under direct attack.

And here’s the intersectional reality: in 2024, 48% of LGBTQIA2S+ adults reported having a disability, compared to 36% of the general population. Disabled people and queer people are not separate populations. We overlap massively. An attack on one community is structurally an attack on the other.

Disability rights and queer rights are tied together. Defending bodily autonomy requires a unified disability justice front. This is not solidarity as a nice gesture. This is solidarity as survival.

[SLIDE 13: “Collective Liberation”]

Patty Berne and Sins Invalid describe disability justice as a vision and a practice oriented toward a future we haven’t reached yet. It’s a map we’re creating alongside our ancestors and our descendants. It’s a movement toward a world where every body and mind is recognized as beautiful.

That vision is what I want to leave you with today.

No body or mind left behind. Only moving together can we accomplish what this moment requires.

[CLOSING — after final slide]

So here’s my call to action, and I’ll keep it concrete.

Learn these 10 principles. Not as a poster on a wall, but as a practice. Ask yourself which ones your organization is actually enacting and which ones it’s ignoring.

Follow the leadership of disabled queer and trans BIPOC. Not as a token gesture, but structurally. Who is in the room when decisions get made? Who has budget authority? Who gets cited? Those are the questions that reveal what an organization actually values.

And stop fighting for a seat at a table that was built to exclude you. Start building new tables. That’s what disability justice asks of us. It’s harder. It’s slower. And it’s the only approach that has ever actually worked.

If you want to go deeper, I’d recommend Sins Invalid’s document “Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People,” which lays out the disability justice framework in the collective’s own words. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice” is another essential text.

Thank you for your time today, and thank you for spending part of this ADA anniversary thinking about what comes next.

Approximate run time: 25–28 minutes at conversational pace.