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    Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine
    Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine
    Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine
    Audiobook7 hours

    Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine

    Written by Michele Lent Hirsch

    Narrated by Frankie Corzo

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Featured in The Advocate, New York Times, Literary Hub, Autostraddle, and New York magazine's The Cut

    This is a vital exploration of the ways society overlooks—and fails—young women with disabilities and chronic illnesses

    Miriam’s doctor didn’t believe she had breast cancer. She did.

    Sophie navigates being the only black scientist in her lab while studying the very disease, HIV, that she hides from her coworkers.

    For Victoria, coming out as a transgender woman was less difficult than coming out as bipolar.

    Michele Lent Hirsch knew she couldn’t be the only woman who's dealt with serious health issues at a young age, as well as the resulting effects on her career, her relationships, and her sense of self. What she found while researching Invisible was a surprisingly large and overlooked population—and now, with long COVID emerging, one that continues to grow. 

    Though young women with serious illness tend to be seen as outliers, young female patients are in fact the primary demographic for many illnesses. They are also one of the most ignored groups in our medical system—a system where young women, especially women of color and trans women, are invisible.

    And because of expectations about gender and age, young women with health issues must often deal with bias in their careers and personal lives. Not only do they feel pressured to seem perfect and youthful, they also find themselves amid labyrinthine obstacles in a culture that has one narrow idea of womanhood.

    Lent Hirsch weaves her own experiences together with stories from other women, perspectives from sociologists on structural inequality and inequity, and insights from neuroscientists on misogyny in health research. She shows how health issues and disabilities amplify what women in general already confront: warped beauty standards, workplace sexism, worries about romantic partners, and mistrust of their own bodies. By shining a light on this hidden demographic, Lent Hirsch explores the challenges that all women face.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBeacon Press Audio
    Release dateFeb 27, 2018
    ISBN9780807092316
    Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine

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    Reviews for Invisible

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5

      Nov 12, 2024

      With a combination of research studies and personal interviews, Hirsch goes over how major health issues can affect women in relationships, work, the medical system, and change how they make major life decisions.

      I was prompted to check out this book from the library because I've suffered through a few health issues in the past five years or so, including a severe back injury and thyroid disease.

      It didn't seem like my health issues would be "important enough" to count when I compared them to what I expected this book to cover. However, I realized I'd been dismissing myself, much like many women are taught to do when we have serious problems.

      Although I haven't had cancer, life-threatening allergies, or many of the other life-or-death conditions mentioned in this book, I found I could identify a lot with the difficulties in functioning at work, etc.--and I even have a supportive workplace! It's just so ingrained in women to put others' feelings first and ignore our own, even if that means that we're not addressing things that really need to be addressed.

      It's appalling what some of the women in this book went through just to be taken seriously in the medical system and at work, get treatment, and have someone recognize that they are worthy of love. I could even identify with that part--I haven't dated many guys, but although I've been married for twelve years, I still found myself questioning whether I was still worth loving when I was at the height of my health struggles.

      It was also excellent that Hirsch looked at all of these topics from the intersectional perspectives of race, sexuality, and gender.

      Ultimately, this is an important and affirming book for any woman who has major health problems.