State fines Delaware bar after employee tells trans woman to use the men’s room, then bans her

A Delaware bar has been fined a second time for discriminating against a transgender woman.

The owner of Hideout Arcade Bar & Grille was fined $15,000 by the Delaware Human and Civil Rights Commission, according to the Delaware News Journal.

An order issued by the commission in July shows that Hideout employees denied trans woman Kaitie Sorber access to the women’s restroom in the restaurant. “She was confronted, required to display her identification again, and instructed she could only use the men’s bathroom,” reads a complaint summary. A week later, after Sorber complained on social media about the treatment, she was denied entry to the establishment entirely and told she was permanently banned.

Representatives of the bar said they required Sorber to use the men’s room based on the gender listed on her state ID and pointed to a process by which individuals can apply to the state to have that designation changed based on their gender identity. But the commission noted that, outside of her paycheck and state ID, Sorber had lived as a woman in her daily life since 2018.

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“She does not hide her female gender identity and is proud of it,” the order reads.

The commission ruled that the bar and its owner, Bryan Derrickson, had again discriminated against a trans woman.

The latest penalty came just over a year after the same bar was fined $2,000 for denying a transgender woman entry in 2023. Half of that went to Kathy Carpenter Brown, who experienced the discrimination and is the founder of Transliance, an LGBTQ advocacy group in Delaware. The other half went to a state Special Administration Fund to help educate business operators about the state’s anti-discrimination policies.

In the prior case, the bar used an ID scanner to designate which restroom patrons would be allowed to use, then denied entry to a trans woman who refused to allow her ID to be scanned.

In addition to the fine, the commission ordered all employees to undergo anti-discrimination and equal accommodations training, according to News Journal reporting at the time.

Both incidents for which the Hideout was fined date back to 2023. According to the order, Derrickson implemented a policy that year to use state IDs, which the bar already scanned to check for fraudulent identification, to determine bathroom access. “I thought, well, this is easy,” he said in testimony. “Driver’s license, whatever they have on it, if it’s male, female or something else, we’ll go by that.”

He also said the bar acted in response to a prior complaint from a patron whose 8-year-old daughter complained about using a restroom with a trans woman. But the commission took issue with the fact that Derrickson only spoke to the girl’s parents and never spoke to the child to determine whether she truly felt “threatened.”

Carpenter has continued to call for boycotts of all businesses owned by Derrickson, including Hideout, Conch Island and Crushers.

The bar is near Rehoboth Beach, which this month elected its first out mayor, Susan Stewart, according to the Cape Gazette. Delaware voters in 2024 also elected U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride, the nation’s first out transgender congresswoman, to the state’s sole seat in Congress.