This chapter critically engages with a central policy norm developed by key international actors working on statelessness and refugeeness over the last three decades. This is the norm that for stateless refugees their refugeeness effectively trumps their statelessness. I term this norm, which arbitrarily separates and ranks statelessness and refugeeness, the “protection hierarchy”. This norm is increasingly being called into question by a range of actors due to growth of research on stateless refugees which shows that statelessness is both very impactful and highly intertwined with refugeeness.The chapter empirically interrogates this normative policy position, showing that the “protection hierarchy” not only fails to protect stateless refugees, but actually increases the populations’ vulnerability. Due to this, the chapter argues for the use of evidenced based policies on stateless refugees and the dismantling of the ”protection hierarchy”.