Cora Castle brings something most stages don't see: a transgender electrical engineer who has invented a product, passed legislation, and chaired a state commission… and can make an audience laugh while doing it. Whether your event needs a keynote that challenges assumptions, a talk that connects personal story to systemic change, or a speaker who genuinely knows how policy gets made, Cora delivers.
The Funny Thing I Had to Fix
Most people who set out to change the world have a plan. Cora Castle had a t-shirt and a list. In this keynote, she traces the unexpected arc from gender transition to clean energy invention to state commission chair and the engineering mindset that connects all of it. Funny, honest, and genuinely surprising, this talk is about what happens when you stop waiting for someone else to solve the problem and start treating your own life as the first system worth fixing.
I've always had a knack for finding the human way of fixing broken things. But it took me a while to realize I was one of them.
Curb Your Enthusiasm: How to Electrify our Communities and Rewrite the Rules to Do It
Half of Americans can't conveniently own an electric vehicle because they can't charge one at home. Cora Castle decided to fix that, by inventing a product, then drafting the legislation to make it legal, then deploying it on the street where she lives. This talk is for anyone who has ever watched a good idea die because the rules weren't ready for it. It's a practical, entertaining, and surprisingly policy-forward story about what it actually takes to bring a world-changing idea from sketch to street.
I drafted legislation with no prior experience, no lobbyist, and no legal training. Just YouTube tutorials and Law & Order reruns. It passed with a bipartisan supermajority.
From Margin to Mechanism
There's a significant difference between advocating for a seat at the table and actually running the meeting. As Chair of Delaware's LGBTQ+ Commission, Cora Castle knows what it takes to move from being affected by a system to being the person responsible for building and enforcing it. This talk examines the gap between laws that exist on paper and laws that are consistently enforced — and what leaders, organizations, and institutions can do to close it.