Topless protest underway at Sage Colleges in Troy

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TROY, N.Y. — Some students at the Troy campus of The Sage Colleges were rallying topless Wednesday to protest what they believe was discriminatory police treatment of a student who identifies as androgynous. The protest came in the wake of an incident Sunday evening, when a school security officer approached Cedar Brock, who was sunbathing topless in a public park that fronts the campus and is across from the Troy Public Library. Brock described the incident in an interview with Times Union on Tuesday. "Are you a boy or a girl?" the officer asked. "I'm neither," Brock said. "I'm androgynous." What followed, according to Brock and others at the campus, was a Sage Park standoff that soon involved Troy police, who insisted that Brock put on a shirt and repeatedly told the student that city law forbids women from going topless in public. "They told me, 'You're in public,'" Brock said Tuesday. "They said, 'This isn't what normal people do.'"

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