Last November, People's Bank customer Lizzi Duff called to check her balance. "I'm low-income," she says. "I have a habit of checking my balance to make sure I don't overdraw." But on that day, Duff says, the bank employee on the other end of the line refused to give her information about her account—even after answering a series of security questions—because she didn't sound like a woman.
"She said, 'I talked to my manager and I can't give you the account information because it says: "Lizzi Duff, female",'" Duff says. "I said, 'That's me! Lizzi Duff, female!'" That phone call, and Duff's unanswered requests for some kind of resolution, have led to an investigation by Seattle's Office for Civil Rights and a planned demonstration this Saturday in front of the People's Bank branch in Ballard.
Exactly two months before that phone call, Duff had her name and gender marker legally changed to female. By her estimation, she worked with roughly 20 different bureaucracies—including her local branch of People's Bank—to get everything squared away. But the bank employee on the phone, Duff says, "profiled my voice as male—that's the illegality. That's discrimination." (The Office for Civil Rights' investigation is still open, but a spokesperson from the agency expects it to release a finding in a few months.)
"I'm not trying to tilt at a windmill here," Duff says. "This is serious for any trans person... Popular culture has recently discovered us, but not a day goes by without some kind of verbal assault against me: mild, in between, or egregious. Not just some days, or a few days, but every fucking day of my life."
Duff contacted the Office of Civil Rights after writing several letters—with the assistance of advocates at the Gender Justice League—to People's Bank that went unanswered. The final letter was sent by certified mail to make sure it was received. "In that case, the letter was delivered to them and they refused to accept it," says Tobi Hill-Meyer of the GJL. "So they had it returned."
Duff says she isn't after money—but she wants People's Bank to engage in transgender sensitivity training, preferably with a trainer from the Gender Justice League.
"I want to change the trans-ignorant and trans-phobic culture at People's Bank," Duff says, as a step towards changing the culture at large—a culture in which verbal and physical assault against transgender persons is still far too prevalent. The FBI began tracking hate crimes against transgender people in December and, according to Dominic Holden at BuzzFeed, "confirmed homicides of transgender women have been unusually high in the United States in the first several months of 2015."
"From the start, I realized I could either walk away from this or try my damnedest to change the corporate culture, one bank at a time," Duff says. "I think it's significant to take a smallish, local, regional bank and change it. But so far they're refusing to accept our demand" for a company-wide training. (After several phone calls and a battery of security questions, Duff was finally able to check her balance—and says she's never had a problem banking in person at her local Magnolia branch.)
Tony Repanich, the executive vice president of People's Bank, wrote in an email: "We regret this is the approach that Lizzi has taken... We dispute some of the items within the complaint, however we believe the Civil Rights Office has a fair and equitable program to resolve complaints and we are actively participating in that process." He added that "in today's world of identity theft and account compromises," the bank must balance "a higher level of customer service" with protecting their customers' "private and confidential information," and that the employees of People's Bank "welcome all customers equally."
Elliot Bronstein of the Office for Civil Rights estimates that it gets several hundred complaints a year and investigates over 200, with roughly 20 to 30 percent of those resulting in some kind of settlement.
As for the demonstration on Saturday, Hill-Meyer says she hopes People's Bank will "come to the table" to talk about ways to make transgender clients feel more welcome. "I think in situations like this, there’s often very easy solutions," she says—such as instructing employees not to profile people based on what their voices sound like.
"That should not, by itself, be a reason to deny service," she says. "It would be totally inappropriate for an organization to refuse services because someone has an ethnic-sounding name but doesn't have an accent that [the employee thinks] matches that ethnicity."
