“I am a customer of this bank,” she insists. “I have renewed my card in this branch and use it frequently. The bank has all my details, and the manager has never doubted that I am who I am. But she told me to use the bank’s ATM. ‘We’ve been told not to hand money to any woman with male ID.’” Viktoria’s colleague asked the manager whether Viktoria was being refused her money because she was a transgender woman, and the manager confirmed that this was the case.

Viktoria recorded the entire conversation and immediately sent a request to the bank to explain its refusal to serve a customer, but had no response within the prescribed 15 days. She then sent a second request, this time online, but again received no response.

Having exhausted all possibilities of resolving the issue without resorting to the courts, Viktoria, with the support of human rights expert Tatyana Chernobil, sent the police an official complaint against the bank manager on grounds of discrimination. In it, she demand that a criminal charge be brought for “a breach of my rights as a person and a citizen”.

“At the police station, they didn’t want to accept my complaint – we were sent from office to office” says Viktoriya. “They eventually saw us, but two days later they announced that they couldn’t register a charge because there was no crime! And the investigator didn’t question me once.”

Viktoria then contacted an examining magistrate to file a complaint against the investigator in question. But when the judge examined the case, he didn’t examine the complaint against the investigator, but the actual incident in the bank. Viktoria was stunned to see that the case now included testimony from the bank manager, but not herself.

“It got most interesting after I posted on Facebook, mentioning the bank, the police and human rights groups,” Viktoria tells me. “This was the day before the examination of my appeal against the magistrate’s decision to refuse my right to a defence. So after reading my post, the people at the bank got their act together and wrote to me that senior management was unaware of the conflict, that they were very sorry and that they wanted to fix everything. They explained that they didn’t know how to work with transgender people and asked me to teach them. We agreed to meet before we went to court. On the day of the case, no one contacted me. The case was heard after lunch, and was thrown out in less than 15 minutes.”

In early January 2019 Viktoria brought a civil case to court, demanding compensation for emotional distress. As Kazakhstan law requires a specific sum to be named in compensation cases, she requested the symbolic sum of one tenge (£0.002). Her aim was to draw the attention of bank senior management to its employees’ discriminatory treatment towards her and demand a public apology.

“I won’t stop. I’ll go to the UN,” Viktoria tells me. “I want the bank to stop discriminating against people, especially transgender people. I still feel it’s disgusting and shameful – I was never treated like that before.” Viktoria also knows that two other transgender women have faced discrimination from the People’s Bank of Kazakhstan.

Before this incident, Viktoria had never encountered any problems with government or commercial amenities that require you to show ID papers. She had frequently travelled around the country using her existing ID, and had in fact set up and paid off a personal loan with another bank without any trouble.

“I haven’t yet changed my ID document to one that matches my new gender identity because the state is forcing me to undergo mutilating operations, which is tantamount to torture. My state of health and the cost of the operations don’t allow me to change my ID,” Viktoria tells me.

In this situation it’s important to note that the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture has condemned similar requirements, considering forced sex change operations torture or cruel treatment. “International and regional human rights agencies have begun to recognise that violence and abuse against women requesting services in the area of reproductive health can cause intense and prolonged physical and psychological suffering occasioned by the fact of their gender. Examples of this include... forced sterilisation...female genital mutilation.”

Meanwhile Kazakhstan’s Constitution and Criminal Code ban torture and other types of cruel treatment, including that based on any kind of discrimination.