Last year, India's Supreme Court declared the transgender community as a legal third gender, granting them minority rights and privileges to education, employment and health benefits.
Since then, some colleges have offered a choice in indicating their gender in application forms. So the right to choose one’s own sexuality has come under much debate. some recent news show that the traditional attitude towards alternative sexuality are slowly, but definitively, changing for the better.

For the first time a transgender woman has been appointed as the principal of a college in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. Manabi Bandhopadhyay will head the Krishnagar Women's College.  Dipak K Kar, chairman of an education panel that selects college principals in the state, in a statement said "She has been teaching in a college for more than 20 years, and had the necessary administrative experience. She was chosen through the usual selection process,"

We also saw in the beginning of this year our first transgender mayor being elected in Raigarh, after defeating nearest rival from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Independent candidate Madhu, won the mayor election of the Raigarh Municipal Corporation by 4,537 votes against BJP's Mahaveer Guruji. Madhu belongs to the Dalit community.

Earlier, Shabnam "Mausi" Bano who is the first transgender Indian to be elected to public office. She was an elected member of the Madhya Pradesh State Legislative Assembly from 1998 to 2003. Shabnam Mausi has inspired a lot of Hijras in India to take up politics and participate in 'mainstream activities' in India, giving up their traditional roles as dancers, prostitutes, and beggars, living on the fringe of Indian society; for example they sometimes attend weddings or the house of a newborn child offering services to ward off bad luck.

We also have India’s first transgender news anchor Prakash, 31, . She works at the Tamil language channel based in Coimbatore in the state of Tamil Nadu. She’s done all sorts of work — everything from transgender rights activism to teaching dance to acting in a soap opera to competing in transgender beauty pageants. Prakash worked for Lotus News, based in Coimbatore for about a month before she was promoted in August 2014 to anchor its 7 p.m. broadcast.

Kalki Subramaniam is a journalist, writer, actor and activist. She holds two Masters: in Journalism and Mass Communication, and International Relations. Now, she is an entrepreneur. She is also a transgender. That makes her, she says, India's first transgender entrepreneur.

India is much more progressive than the US when it comes to the third sex, says activist Amruta Alpesh Soni. She is only the second to get an Indian passport in the "T" (transgender) category and the first such to get a US visa,  under the "female" category.

These pieces of news prove that even if the people are trying their best to take us back to the middle ages, a different section of people is waking up to the grievances of this section of society. And it’s high time we did, too. Let’s give them their due.