Hot take alert because I took a triptan yesterday and I can't focus on anything other than this here bird site:

Invisible disability doesn't (or shouldn't) refer to what the general public sees or notices. It's about what's "visible" - and therefore real - to the medical gaze.

Invisible disabilities are those whose etiology cannot be localized by the clinic, and which are therefore frequently framed as unreal or psychosomatic.

And it's important to recognize this distinction because we often talk about disability history as a singular thing whose relationship to medicine and abled society has been defined by hypervisibility and spectacle.

But there's another set of disability histories that have been characterized by the opposite - invisibility and erasure.

And by positioning the in/visible dichotomy as false, we continue to perpetuate that erasure.

(This is why, even as I now use a wheelchair about 90% of the time, I still identify as invisibly disabled. Because it's not about what laypeople see, it's about what the clinic sees, and how that has defined my experience of disabled identity and relationship to my body.)