A handful of women marched to the State House on Saturday topless, calling on the Massachusetts legislature to end gender discrimination by allowing females to bare their breasts without consequences.

“It feels good, it feels happy, it feels safe,” Massachusetts native Katrina Brees said of being topless. “One of the biggest fears that women have about creating gender equality is that women will be hurt, but violence is always used to make us complicit for every oppression.”

Brees, wearing stickers covering her nipples and an American flag draped over her back, organized Saturday’s protest that drew more curious onlookers than participants as the group walked from the Embrace statue to the State House, chanting “Free your breast, free your mind.”

Co-organized by GoTopless.org and Equalititty.us, the protest was advertised as the “first topless protest in Boston.”

“It seems to be a pretty liberal place so we felt we would try here and get a good turnout,” GoTopless president Nadine Gary told the Herald. “I think we did. Of course, many more men than women which we are used to but it is OK.”

While the vast majority of states have at least legally established topless equality — although some people are still cited illegally under various public nuisance statutes, advocates say — Massachusetts is among a handful of states that “have ambiguous state laws on the matter,” according to GoTopless.

Brees, who now lives in New Orleans and is an activist for Equalititty Now, called the Massachusetts law “perhaps the most oppressive of any breast law in the nation.”

“It says female human breast which, to me, feels like they don’t want dogs getting caught up with it,” she said. “Also, if we cover our nipples, the entire breast becomes illegal so really the woman herself is illegal.”

Topless equality won a victory in Nantucket in 2022 when at the annual town meeting, residents adopted the Gender Equality on Beaches bylaw, which then-Attorney General and now-Gov. Maura Healey approved that December. The Herald reported that its first summer in effect went swimmingly.

GoTopless, based in Las Vegas, has been an advocacy group since 2007, forming after a woman named Phoenix Feeley was wrongfully arrested for walking topless in New York City.

Activists have marched in more than 30 countries around the world including Spain, France and Germany, while also making their efforts felt in cities across the U.S. They’ll be headed to New York next Saturday for their annual visit on Topless Day.

“We encourage the women to exercise their rights,” Gary said. “It’s like when women had the right to vote in 1920, but at first, they were shy about going to vote. … They need a little time and that’s what we’re here for, to change the culture.”

A trans woman identified as Butterfly spoke about the different experiences of being shirtless as a man and as a woman – the latter including being choked and assaulted.

Men were given the legal freedom to be topless in public in 1936.

“It is a very serious equality issue to criminalize some people’s bodies and not others,” Butterfly said. “No one’s body should be criminalized. We all have bodies. We are all people. We all exist. And we all deserve freedom.”

Nadine Gary, president of Gotopless.org., hands out pamphlets to on-lookers prior to marching in protest of laws restricting women from baring their breasts in public. (Paul Connors/Boston Herald)
Nadine Gary, president of Gotopless.org., marches in protest of laws restricting women from baring their breasts in public. (Paul Connors/Boston Herald)