The more accepting attitude towrdas the gay movement can be seen in the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain and the EU, the recognition of transgender individuals as legally being of the sex they now choose to be. Public attitudes towards homosexuality have also changed to a large extent; the vindictive scapegoating of gays of the 1980s has been replaced by a broader, though not total, acceptance with the general public. And sometimes it seems it's getting better; and sometimes it seems like it's getting worse.

This case is known as Goodwin and I vs. UK and the judgment was delivered in July 2002. Both pursuers (those bringing the case) were Transgender. One of the pursuers had faced sexual harassment at work following her gender reassignment surgery while the other had been refused admittance to a dental course as she refused to show her birth certificate (showing as it did her previous gender). Both complained about the lack of legal recognition of their post-operative gender, their treatment in employment, their inability to marry either as a woman or as a man and various other aspects of their plight.

Rather annoyingly, the moral majority approach the issue of rights as connected to religion, even though these days people see the church and state as separate, which they're not, in Britain at least. It must really be about time to start seperating the two, surely?

So we can have a civil partnership which gives us the same rights as someone who’s married. Right? Wrong. There are still important differences between a civil partnership and a marriage and the Scottish Government in starting a consultation on the possibility of allowing same-sex marriage has let loose a predictable furore from the Scottish Roman Catholic church.

Gay history and gay legal history are two intricately intertwined strands of gay culture. Gay legal history is a story of large-scale persecution and discrimination, and so it follows that gay legal history has had a profound effect on the broader development of gay culture. What's more, gay culture is everybody's culture.

It’s incredible to think that LGBT activism is so recent, and that legal provision against discrimination is generally even younger, and still non-existent in many areas, And this when LGBT people have been propping up world culture from Plato, through Leonardo da Vinci to Oscar Wilde.