In Denver in 1978, just after the July 4 holiday, 19 men and women with disabilities positioned themselves in front of public buses at the busy intersection of Colfax Avenue and Broadway. They chanted “We will ride!” until city transportation officials were willing to hear their complaints: Namely, that lack of access to public transportation led to disenfranchisement and discrimination, which led to joblessness, homelessness, despair and misery.

These pioneers, known now as the “Gang of 19,” were not simply irritating commuters by blocking the intersection all day and into the night — they were demanding to be heard, and, perhaps most important, to be seen. They are praised now as important activists, although news coverage at the time was far from celebratory. The protest was an early sign of progress to come, including the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990, which established the fundamental rights of access and equal opportunity that had so long been denied this marginalized group of human beings.

Yet in late June, nearly 40 years after the Gang of 19 protests, I experienced a troubling moment of déjà vu as I watched disability rights activists being hauled out of their wheelchairs outside the Denver offices of Senator Cory Gardner. The sit-in was a protest against the Republican Party’s proposed drastic cuts in Medicaid, cuts that would certainly push millions of people with disabilities out of sight and into the neglect and despair of institutions, home confinement, joblessness and poverty. I was saddened, bewildered and angered that a movement that gave so many so much more life could have come so far, only to be forced to protest the same issues all over again — basically, our right, as people with nonnormative bodies, to basic access, to our very existence.

In 1978 my parents watched live footage of the Gang of 19 protests on their television (my father remembers getting up to turn up the sound) in the weeks before my amputation, the first of six operations I would have in the next five years, from ages 4 to 9. I was born with a congenital birth defect that required amputation so that I might be fitted with a prosthetic limb; this was considered, in my case, the best shot I had at a “normal” life — which my parents viewed as an ability to work, make an impact, have mobility, be considered equal to others, even if my body was built differently. They desperately wanted this for me, and were willing to change jobs and move across the country to make it happen. It was a propitious move, as I would later become an early student in the adaptive ski program in the Rocky Mountains, an experience that, more than any other in my childhood, changed my life.