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In seventh grade, my youngest child came home excited from school because they had watched the Oscar-nominated documentary "Crip Camp." The film, which is great, tells a story about the formation of the modern disability rights movement mostly through the story of a remarkable summer camp for disabled teenagers, but culminating in the 1977 "504 sit-in," an act of civil disobedience that forced the federal government to define and defend the rights of disabled Americans for the first time. But that's not what got my kid excited. They had just received a 504 plan to accommodate their ADHD for the first time and so saw themselves in the film. They told me they thought, "Hey! That's me!"

There are a lot of kids for whom the story of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act might resonate. In Minnesota alone, well over 100,000 children have 504 plans, designed to adapt their educations in small, usually cost-free, but highly meaningful ways. If your family doesn't have someone with a 504, someone you know and love does. Which is why it should come as a shock that 17 Republican attorneys general are, right now, suing to declare Section 504 unconstitutional.

Here's the story: Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act requires that no program receiving federal funds can discriminate against disabled people. But as we've seen way too often lately, it's one thing to pass a law and another to enforce it. That requires the nitty-gritty hard work that federal employees can do so well. For 504 to take effect, the federal government had to issue regulations that defined disability, defined discrimination, and outlined methods of enforcement and remedy for violation. The Ford and then the Carter administrations stalled on the process, but the protests in 1977 forced their hand and resulted in robust regulations. Not to be confused with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs – my older child, who has Down syndrome, has one of those), 504 plans can offer small but necessary adjustments in education that can wholly transform a child's experience at minimal cost. My kid's 504 plan mostly just involved better communication between school and home, meaning their work didn't fall through the cracks.

The question of what kinds of conditions count as disabilities remains fraught and often politically charged. In 2008, the bipartisan Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act expanded the definition, especially to incorporate more mental disabilities. More recently, in May 2024, the Biden administration ruled that gender dysphoria could be protected as a disability under 504 — note, not must be, but could be. This will be important. Republican AGs sued in Texas federal court. The lawsuit, Texas v. Becerra (Xavier Becerra was Secretary of Health and Human Services, which issued the rule), first argues that gender dysphoria should not be considered a disability, but then makes a startling leap. Count III of the lawsuit bluntly claims: "Section 504 is Unconstitutional."

Don't panic. What is probably going to happen next is that the Trump administration will withdraw from the lawsuit (it's now Trump's Justice Department and HHS Department, after all) and say they will not be protecting gender dysphoria. Over the past couple of weeks, disability organizations have activated around the lawsuit and are pressuring the attorneys general to withdraw from the case. And while there has long been extreme right-wing opposition to disability rights, in general I expect 504 to survive. However, there's still a chance that Republican judges could take this opportunity to unravel a core protection for disabled Americans (including disabled adults in other contexts, but my experience with 504 has been in schools), and it's scary that so many leading Republican officials are eager to declare 504 simply unconstitutional. Disabled life in America relies on a loosely woven net of federal and local systems — a net with huge holes through which many plummet — and 504 is one of the thick hawsers barely holding things together. Cut that, and watch us fall.

Whatever happens, there are two key lessons for everyone to take away from Texas v. Becerra. First, the fundamental bipartisan consensus surrounding basic disability rights is under threat. And in fact, there's no reason to be confident about the safety of any of the advances of the 20th century, from Social Security and Medicare to the Americans with Disabilities Act and 504 to the end of Jim Crow and the basic achievement of legal integration. And that leads to the second lesson: Attacks on any one group will be used as a wedge to attack all of us. You may not personally know any trans people, and you may even be uncomfortable with the idea that people's gender identity might not match what they were assigned at birth, but letting this attack go forward will eventually hurt you and the things you love, too.

But actually, you probably do know someone who, like 13% of Minnesota teens, identifies as something other than cisgender, you just might not know it yet. I am lucky enough to know and love a trans person. It's my youngest child, the one with the 504 plan. Their journey hasn't always been easy — what teenager's is? But the only real obstacle so far has been transphobic parents worried that trans might be contagious (it's not). This is the moment in which they come for trans people. You know the poem by Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller. You know what happens next. Time to fight back.

David M. Perry is the associate director for undergraduate studies in history at the University of Minnesota — Twin Cities. He's the co-author of "Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe" and the newsletter Modern Medieval.