Editing Jeremy Bentham (section)

=== Gender and sexuality ===
Bentham said that it was the placing of women in a legally inferior position that made him choose in 1759, at the age of eleven, the career of a reformist,{{sfn|Williford|1975|p=167}} though American critic [[John Neal]] claimed to have convinced him to take up women's rights issues during their association between 1825 and 1827.{{sfn|King|1966|p=49}} Bentham spoke for a complete equality between the sexes, arguing in favour of [[women's suffrage]], a woman's right to obtain a divorce, and a woman's right to hold political office.

The {{Circa|1785}} essay "Paederasty (Offences Against One's Self)"{{sfn|Bentham|2008|pp=389–406}} argued for the [[liberalisation]] of laws prohibiting homosexual sex.{{sfn|Campos Boralevi|2012| p= 40}} The essay remained unpublished during his lifetime for fear of offending public morality. Some of Bentham's writings on "sexual non-conformity" were published for the first time in 1931,{{sfn|Campos Boralevi|2012| p= 37}} but ''Paederasty'' was not published until 1978.<ref>''Journal of Homosexuality'', v.3:4 (1978), 389–405; continued in v.4:1 (1978)</ref> Bentham does not believe homosexual acts to be unnatural, describing them merely as "irregularities of the venereal appetite". The essay chastises the society of the time for making a disproportionate response to what Bentham appears to consider a largely private offence—public displays or forced acts being dealt with rightly by other laws. When the essay was published in the ''Journal of Homosexuality'' in 1978, the [[Abstract (summary)|abstract]] stated that Bentham's essay was the "first known argument for homosexual law reform in England".{{sfn|Bentham|2008|pp=389–406}}