Women can swim topless in Berlin public pools now

New regulations ensure equal rights for ‘male, female or non-binary’ Berlin residents and ‘create legal certainty’ for pool staff members

A spokesperson for the swimming association in Germany’s capital city announced that “topless swimming is equally allowed to everyone” in all Berlin public pools now.

New rules for public swimming pools and bathing facilities, allowing women to use them topless, have been introduced after a recent successful anti-discrimination complaint filed against the city by a 33-year-old female pool-goer.

The woman claimed that the supervisory staff at one of the Berlin pools requested she covered her breasts during a visit to the facility in December 2022. After she refused to do so, she was forced leave the facility.

In her complaint filed in the wake of the incident, the woman argued that the pool’s rules did not have any gender-specific regulations and only required the pool-goers to wear “common bathing suits.”

As a result of the complaint, Berlin’s public swimming pools and bathing facilities rules were changed.

Berlin’s anti-discrimination ombudsperson praised the policy update as a “step towards creating equal rights” for all city residents.

“Berlin bathing establishments will apply their bathing regulations in a gender-neutral manner,” the city’s government said in a statement, adding that “topless swimming” should now be possible in the city’s public indoor and outdoor swimming pools for “all females or people with breasts perceived as feminine.”

However, the new rules do not mean that women in Berlin are obligated to swim topless, and they can still cover their breasts if they want to, the city officials clarified.

According to the city’s anti-discrimination ombudsperson, the new regulations ensure equal rights for ‘male, female or non-binary’ Berlin residents and ‘create legal certainty’ for pool staff members.

“Now it is about ensuring the regulation is applied consistently and there are no more evictions or pool bans,” the ombudsperson said.

Berlin is not the first city in Germany to allow women use public pools topless. North-Rhine Westphalian city of Siegen and Goettingen in the neighboring Lower Saxony have also introduced such rules in 2022. Lower Saxony’s capital of Hannover followed suit by the end of last year.