Left wing groups and bloggers often accuse each other of playing a “more oppressed than thou” card – something which is also called “climbing up the greasy totem pole of oppression.” The idea is that whichever group or person can claim to be most oppressed has the moral high ground. It is a really awful way to do politics, but at the same time it has some basis in reality.

Consider: today the Gubernator of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed into law several bills that the local LGBT community had been campaigning for. These include the establishment of Harvey Milk Day on May 22nd to celebrate LGBT rights movement, and agreeing to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other parts of the USA. This is all well and good.

However, as Monica Roberts reports, the Gubernator also vetoed a number of bills specifically designed to benefit trans people.

Politicians like Arnie don’t do things like this by accident. They make very careful assessments of the state of public opinion and act accordingly. Arnie clearly thinks that he can’t get away with being down on lesbians and gays (and indeed may sympathize with them), but he feels that he can’t be seen to be sympathetic to trans people (even if he is). He makes the LGBT lobby happy in some ways, and panders to the religious right in others. And because of the way the public views different parts of the LGBT community it is the T people who come off worst.

Pretty much the same is true in the UK. Today the Equality & Human Rights Commission issued a paper titled Beyond Tolerance which seeks to lay out guidelines for progressing LGB (but not T) rights in Britain. This particular quote caught my eye:

Seven in 10 lesbians (69 per cent) and gay men (70 per cent) felt they could be open about their sexual orientation in the workplace without fear of discrimination or prejudice. This contrasts sharply with only around two in 10 (23 per cent) bisexual men and three in 10 (30 per cent) bisexual women who felt the same.

In other words, public acceptance of bisexuality in the UK lags far behind public acceptance of homosexuality. Had trans people been included in the study in question I’m fairly sure that the number that felt they could be open about their status at work would have been well below 10%.

But with social acceptability comes a price. Trans people in the UK are, at least in theory, allowed to keep their status secret. If they are outed against their will by someone who needed to know (e.g. a pensions company) then in theory they can sue. The same is not true, as far as I’m aware, of LGB people. Indeed, the whole thrust of the Beyond Tolerance paper is that LGB people must be more open about themselves, and be prepared to stand up and be counted, specifically in government surveys, so that their place in society can be better understood and better catered for. The EHRC acknowledges that some people in certain professions, in certain parts of the country, and so on, cannot be as open as they might like, but it places the onus on those who are fortunate to stand up for their colleagues.

It is a messy business, this dealing with diversity, and I don’t envy people whose job it is to try to craft policies and make them work. Inevitably whatever you do cannot be right for everyone, so someone is bound to yell FAIL! at you. All that we can hope for is that we keep on moving forward.