Okay so....there was a post about Barbara Gordon and visible vs. invisible disability floating around on here awhile back. And someone wrote an excellent response already (thanks so much to @dilfdoctordoom for pointing everything out that they did), but I wanted to add my own two cents onto it because I felt there were some unaddressed issues...only when I finally got around to actually responding to it, I found out I was blocked by the OP (because tumblr is a hellsite that doesn't actively tell you you're blocked until you try to hit "post"). That's all a preface to say: this is a response to that post, and it's largely responding to the OP's comments about how the current depiction of Babs' disability is "great, actually!" because it provides representation to people with invisible disabilities.

Which...first it needs to be said that the OP is using "invisible disabilities need rep!" to excuse visible disabilities being erased and minimized. Because this isn't a situation where people are looking at a character who's always had invisible disabilities and going "they don't count." This is a character who for thirty years was disabled in a highly visible way and promoted as DC's most prominent physically disabled character...and a character whose existing physical disability (complete spinal cord injury leading to paralysis) was then erased, changed, and continuously minimized to justify making her a walking Batgirl again. DC also did this while erasing two other female characters (one of whom, Cassandra Cain, was disabled herself and actually is an example of someone with an invisible disability).

Barbara's disability, by its nature, is not one that should be portrayed as invisible. She was shot in a way that completely severed her spinal cord and shattered the surrounding bone structure. That was always her disability and despite the spinal chip magi-cure it technically remains her disability. Even if she can walk, she should still either be an ambulatory wheelchair user or using a cane/forearm braces, on the page, consistently. Her disability should be visible; that was the intention of her creators (one of whom was a disabled woman) and that was the representation she provides. She's also worn glasses since her introduction as a character, a disability that was also erased in the New 52/Burnside era via editorial mandate (and one that we have only recently won back post-Infinite Frontier). I find it interesting that OP chose not to comment on that.

Cassandra's disability, however, is invisible and always has been. Her struggles with speech and language are not ones that can be seen just by looking at her. She's been an incredible avenue of representation for people with learning, speech, and language processing issues for 22 years. And yet she got first character assassinated, then pushed to the sidelines, and then erased from the universe entirely because DC couldn't bear to have a disabled Asian woman wearing the Batgirl mantle instead of Barbara Gordon.

And while Stephanie isn't relevant in a conversation surrounding disability, I would like to point out that she became Batgirl largely by accident due to being resurrected at a time when 'who should be the new Batgirl?' was a topic being hotly debated. Babs was as close to being magi-cured and Batgirl again in 2009 as Dick was to being killed in Infinite Crisis (which is to say, pretty damn close). Steph becoming Batgirl only delayed the inevitable, which was a coordinated multi-year editorial effort to push Cass out of the cowl and Babs back into it.

So if people like OP want to talk about the representation of visible vs. invisible disability, I think we should talk about how making Babs a walking Batgirl again erased representation of both types of disability in the process. Because it was not a decision made to give representation to people with invisible disabilities. It was a decision made because Dan Didio and a small group of similarly powerful old, white, male, able-bodied managers wanted the Batgirl from their childhoods to be on the pages again, and if they had to erase two disabled characters and multiple female characters entirely to make it work, they were willing to do so.

Nearly all subsequent writers have effectively erased her disability by omission via giving occasional lip service to it-occasional comments about the chip, the back brace, the cane-and then disregarding it entirely whenever it suits them to do so (repeatedly showing Babs in inaccessible living and working environments, having her continually suit up as Batgirl despite saying it should be an "emergency only" thing, constantly showing her standing/with her legs crossed/in weird positions when she is sitting like there's an editorial mandate on artists to remind people 'she's not paralyzed! she can walk now!', etc).

And those creative and editorial decisions need to be talked about when discussing the treatment of Babs and frankly all of the Batgirls since 2011, because it's objectively ableist writing and it's frankly incredibly tiring to have to continually point this out despite the well-sourced and thorough discussions Babs fans (both abled and disabled) have written on the subject over the past 11 years.