Letter to the Times: Lawrence city ordinance on toplessness is sexist, transphobic

Share this post or save for later

Note: The Lawrence Times runs opinion columns and letters to the Times written by community members with varying perspectives on local issues. These pieces do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Times staff.

Would you like to send a letter to the Times? Great! Here’s how to do it.

The City of Lawrence has an ordinance in its code that prohibits women from being topless, labeling it as indecent exposure. Now that the state has passed SB 180, which defines a man and woman as the sex assigned to someone at birth, that means our ordinance against topless women is also an ordinance against trans men from going shirtless in public.

This past week our police chief answered questions about how our police will deal with SB 180. When I asked about our ordinance against topless women, I was told that our cops currently don’t enforce the ordinance. So if we have a sexist and transphobic ordinance that the police won’t enforce because it’s sexist and transphobic, why are we keeping it as part of city code?!?

I first complained about our topless ordinance years ago at a City Commission meeting and periodically have brought up removing it from city code since then to no avail. Our current commissioners must not see a problem with the ordinance since they’ve done nothing about it. Now that the state has turned our ordinance into one that prohibits trans men from being shirtless at a pool, can any of our city commissioners finally use common sense and remove our topless ordinance from city code?

— Chris Flowers (he/him), Lawrence

If this local platform matters to you, please help us keep doing this work.
Don’t miss a beat … Click here to sign up for our email newsletters


Click here to learn more about our newsletters first

More Community Voices:

Shawn Alexander: Say his name – Fred Harvey Smith (Column)

Share this post or save for later

”Racial violence has been omnipresent in American history, and in far too many of the incidents, the perpetrators of the crime are acquitted or not even brought up on charges. When I think of such cases I am often haunted by the heinous murder of Fred Harvey Smith here in the land of John Brown in May 1936,” Shawn Alexander writes in this column.

MORE …

Click here to find out how to send a letter to the Times
Previous Article

Get to know Andrew Holt, new director of Downtown Lawrence Inc.

Next Article

Liberty Hall Video to close, shift rentals to new model; candy store to take over the space