In her address to the event, Pride Parade association president Simona Muršec said this year's festival sought to get beneath the seeming comfort and social achievements.

By bringing into focus intersex people, remembrance for victims of fascism, peer violence at schools, homophobic regimes and the institutions' ignorance of the needs of the weakest, the festival has penetrated to the very pores of a social system that condones and legalises discrimination, she said.

The Pride Parade is according to her a warning of lingering discrimination in Slovenia's society but also an opportunity to demand change and equality for each and everyone.

Their message is that there is no excuse for failure to legally recognise transgender persons, for allowing referenda on human rights and for jeopardising the health of transgender and intersex people.

The crowd was also greeted by the head of the European Commission Representation in Slovenia Zoran Stančič and Ljubljana Deputy Mayor Aleš Čerin.

"We must accept each other," Stančič appealed, while Čerin described the city of Ljubljana, which has been the sponsor of the Pride Parade since 2001, as a rainbow city.

The event was joined by several other officials, including National Assembly Speaker Milan Brglez. "We are a society of all and me must be an all-inclusive society," Brglez said in a statement for the STA.

The speaker regretted that the coalition has not yet managed to secure the rights of same-sex people as well as it would want to. "But we've made certain steps," he added.

The Pride Parade was the culmination of a week-long festival that featured a number of events from 9 June designed to look into the invisible reality of lives of LGBTIQ+ persons in Slovenia.

The first pride parade was held in Ljubljana in 2001 as a reaction to the refusal of a Ljubljana bar to let a gay activist enter.

Internationally, the first such event was held in 1969, when a group of New York gays and lesbians resisted police raids on a gay bar.