‘You don’t look like you have a disability’: A tale of hidden and unrecognised disabilities

When you hear the word disability, what comes to your mind?

People often associate the word with visibility, whether a perceptible physical impairment or the use of an assistive device. It’s not unusual to see a wheelchair on posters or posts speaking on disability in any capacity, whether it’s a job advertisement encouraging persons with disabilities to apply, a parking spot or even a government brochure. 

While disability must be recognised in all forms to ensure meaningful inclusion, recognition is often guided by what we can see. This means that disabilities such as psychosocial disabilities, intellectual disabilities or even chronic health conditions are frequently left out due to not having visible markers. 

We conducted research in Kenya and Ghana to understand how disability and inequality activists understand disability, and how it connects to the wider inequality conversation. Listening to these conversations and reflecting on my own experiences as a young woman who has been in the Kenyan mental health advocacy space for the past 5 years, I realised that who we recognise as having a disability shapes who gets included, supported and believed. 

In this post, I discuss why including all people with disabilities matters by exploring invisible and unrecognised disabilities, and what their exclusion reveals about how disability is understood within inequality campaigning and social justice movements. 

Invisible disabilities  

As a person who has hidden disabilities, oftentimes I’m questioned on whether they count as disabilities. So often so, that I sometimes question myself, talk about self-stigma. Stigma, mislabelling and misconceptions shape the way disability is perceived, and sometimes that is a narrow view that only encompasses what can be seen and fails to acknowledge the diverse array of disabilities that exist. 

That became especially clear when I was registering for a government service, and an officer filled out ‘no’ to the disability question on my behalf without asking. In this moment, I realised how often people with disabilities are faced with this paternalistic approach, where decisions are made for us without our inclusion. What made this moment particularly striking was not just the assumption itself, but the setting: it was a government office, a space meant to enable access and put inclusion frameworks into practice. 

That experience highlighted the limited assumptions that people make about who can or cannot have a disability based on external factors, and how those assumptions carry real consequences. That single unchecked box can shape whether a person can access certain services, accommodations and even legal protections. 

Visible but unrecognised  

Visibility alone, however, does not guarantee recognition.One important issue that emerged in our findings was that people understand disability in different ways, and don’t always include everyone. This means that some people who have disabilities, even visible ones, oftenface the added burden of justifying their need for reasonable adjustments, access to resources or support offered to persons with disabilities. For example, participants described difficulties accessing disability certification when their impairments did not align with commonly held expectations of disability. 

When understandings of disability are inconsistent, people are forced to prove the legitimacy of their access needs to institutions, service providers, employers and others who serve as gatekeepers of access. This is not only exhausting but also gives priority to disabilities that align most closely with familiar narratives. 

This lack of a shared understanding of disability undermines meaningful inclusion of all forms of disability and encourages selective representation, which overall slows down inclusion efforts of persons with disabilities within inequality campaigning and social justice movements. 

Including all disabilities 

When we fail to include all disabilities, we often end up reproducing the very exclusions we say we are fighting. We make space for the disabilities that are easiest to recognise, explain and accommodate, while quietly sidelining those that don’t fit society’s narrow image of what disability “should” look like. In doing so, we reinforce the idea that disability has a single, recognisable look, often centred on mobility aids or what aligns with common, visible stereotypes of disability. This leaves little room for the complex, layered realities many people live with.  

Including all disabilities is therefore not just about representation but also about justice. For disability to be meaningfully integrated into wider inequality campaigning, it must be understood as diverse, and shaped by stigma, recognition, and access, not just impairment. Broadening our understanding of disability strengthens inequality and social justice movements as a whole, ensuring no one is left out simply because their disability is less visible, less common or less socially accepted. 

Find out more at the webinar Uniting for change: strengthening collaboration between disability and inequality activists on 4 March 2026 at 1pm UCT/GMT.

This publication was made possible thanks to funding from the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) programme, based at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science.