A Delaware bar has been fined $15,000, its second penalty in two years, after regulators found it discriminated against a transgender woman by forcing her into the men's room and then permanently banning her when she complained.
What the Commission Found
According to the order, Hideout employees stopped Sorber, demanded she show identification a second time, and told her she could only use the men's room. When she pushed back publicly on social media a week later, the bar responded by banning her outright. Owner Bryan Derrickson defended the policy by pointing to the gender marker on Sorber's state ID, and noted Delaware residents can apply to change that marker. But the commission wasn't persuaded, finding that outside of her paycheck and ID, Sorber had lived as a woman since 2018.
She does not hide her female gender identity and is proud of it.
Delaware Human and Civil Rights Commission order
Derrickson testified that he built his bathroom policy around the bar's existing ID scanner, which was originally used to screen for fraudulent identification. "I thought, well, this is easy," he said. "Driver's license, whatever they have on it, if it's male, female or something else, we'll go by that."
I thought, well, this is easy. Driver's license, whatever they have on it, if it's male, female or something else, we'll go by that.
Bryan Derrickson
A Repeat Offense
This isn't Hideout's first run-in with regulators. In 2023, the bar was fined $2,000 after using the same ID-scanner system to deny entry to Kathy Carpenter Brown, a trans woman who refused to let staff scan her ID. Half of that fine went to Carpenter, who went on to found Transliance, a Delaware LGBTQ advocacy group, and has since called for boycotts of all of Derrickson's businesses, including Hideout, Conch Island and Crushers.
The commission's latest order goes further than simply citing a bad policy: it found that Derrickson holds animosity toward transgender people, based on testimony from an employee with firsthand knowledge of his views. Derrickson also told regulators the restroom policy followed a complaint from a parent whose 8-year-old daughter said she felt uncomfortable, but the commission noted he never spoke with the child herself to assess whether she felt genuinely threatened.
Why It Matters
Hideout sits just outside Rehoboth Beach, a longtime LGBTQ vacation hub that just elected its first out mayor, Susan Stewart. Delaware voters also sent Sarah McBride, the nation's first out transgender member of Congress, to Washington in 2024, and the state's governor created an LGBTQ Commission by executive order in January 2025. Against that backdrop, a business openly building bathroom policy around gender markers, and doubling down by banning a customer for objecting, looks less like an isolated misstep and more like a business owner unwilling to keep pace with his own community. Fines can be treated as a cost of doing business. What actually changes behavior is customers deciding where their money goes.
Sources: them., The Advocate
Cover photo: Tim Mossholder / Pexels
