Surprise, surprise, legislation against discrimination based on sexual orientation is being overshadowed by the fact that the bill that just passed the House did not include transgendered people.  It did not include apotemnophiliacs, skopticists, paraphiliacs, Modern Primitives, or skateboarders (who, if you ask them, are absolutely the most-persecuted minority, ever), either.  We'll get there, sisters, brothers and all-of-the-abovers!  Someday! (But don't hold your breath, skateboarders.)

This kind of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is common for the GLBT community.  But then the whole "GLBT" coalition is problematic.  Even the coupling of gay and lesbian, utterly separate sexualities, is touchy, although I understand the political expediency of that unholy alliance.  "Bisexuals" deserve nothing from anyone, bunch of sexual opportunists and sociopaths.  And tacking transgenderism on the end compounds confusion about gender-dysphoria and sexuality, and is to the Gay and Lesbian "cause" what Dennis Kucinich is to the Democrats.  Sort of the UFO wing of the party.

Lumping gays and lesbians together makes some sense, like I said, although there are more varieties of lesbian than there are species of fungi, the sisters do tend to get bossy (they keep moving the L up to the front of GLBT, whereas gays keep moving it back where it belongs), and they also seem more intent on muddying the waters with very abstract and academic notions like "gender-queer" and "gender-performitivity," whereas most gays I know just want to get laid as often as humanly possible.

There is something severe and censorious about the culture of Lesbianism, and the overly-politicized culture of Queer, that, honestly, you don't find in garden-variety gay life.  As catty as gays can be with one another, anyone can walk into a gay bar and be accepted among the rabble, lesbians included.  It's a buzz-kill but it won't cause a riot.  But if a guy walks in on Dyke Night, he's taking his life into his own hands.  Like Pee-Wee Herman in that biker bar.

As for transgenderism, in all its colorful forms.  It may relate in some cases to homosexuality, but homosexuality does not of necessity relate to transgenderism.  There's obviously some play in gay culture with masculine and feminine, as there is in straight culture (think Donald Trump romancing Rudy Giuliani in a dress), but if you accept the notion that gender and sexuality are distinct (and that is the assumption even among queer theorists), transgender-discrimination is a valid but separate issue.

I think that hiring and firing based on any form of blind bigotry should be banned.  But I'm with those who say, let's take it one step at a time.  As more Americans have gotten to know self-identified gays, attitudes have changed.  But the leap from understanding sexual orientation to getting gender-dysphoria, post-genderism, and  transhumanism is, um, a little ways off, let's say.