Women swimmers in Berlin can now go topless at the city’s public pools under the same rules as men, after the municipal pool operator Berliner Bäderbetriebe clarified its house rules following a discrimination complaint.
The case began in December 2022, when a 33-year-old woman was ordered to leave an indoor pool in the district of Reinickendorf because she was swimming topless, a restriction not applied to male swimmers. She filed a complaint with the ombudsperson’s office at Berlin’s Senate Department for Justice, Diversity and Anti-Discrimination, arguing that the pool’s own rules only required standard swimwear and contained no gender-specific requirement to cover the chest.
A spokeswoman for Berliner Bäderbetriebe said the house and bathing rules had not actually barred topless swimming for years, but acknowledged they had been interpreted differently depending on the pool and the guest. The operator has since confirmed that swimwear rules now apply equally regardless of gender, requiring only that primary s*xual organs be covered, with the female breast treated as a secondary s*xual characteristic.
Doris Liebscher, head of the Senate’s ombudsperson’s office, welcomed the clarification, saying it establishes “equal rights for all Berliners, whether male, female or non-binary,” and gives staff legal certainty. She added that going forward “it is important that the regulation is applied consistently and that no more expulsions or house bans are issued.”
The complaint followed a similar incident in the summer of 2021, when French woman Gabrielle Lebreton was ordered to leave a Berlin water park in Treptow-Köpenick after refusing to cover her chest while sunbathing with her five-year-old son. The rule change, first announced in March 2023, applies across the city’s indoor and open-air pools and saunas, including lounge areas, and remains in effect today.