A credit report is generated from a consumer’s file made at a consumer reporting agency (a “CRA”) that collects information about consumers’ history with credit. There are three big CRAs in the United States: Equifax, Experian, & Transunion. These three “credit bureaus” make credit reports by collecting data about consumers’ accounts furnished by creditors and gathered from public records.
Credit bureaus sell credit reports to creditors, landlords, and employers to evaluate consumers prospectively for loans, rentals, or jobs. Credit bureaus and other companies also sell credit scores made with credit report data to (purportedly) estimate the risk of lending to a consumer. Consequently, a good credit history and score are very important in order to obtain credit, jobs, and housing.
Recent surveys indicate that LGBTQ+ people are less likely to have high credit scores that would qualify them for the best offers for mortgages and loans. In CLEAR’s report on the Economic Well-being of LGBTQ Households in the U.S. in 2019, we found that LGBTQ+ adults were 2x more likely than non-LGBTQ+ adults to report Poor or Very Poor credit scores (16% vs. 8%), and over a third of LGBTQ+ people who had submitted applications for credit were turned down (35% vs. 21% of non-LGBTQ+). LGBTQ+ women and people of color were even more likely to say that they have a poor or very poor credit score, and were also more likely to say that they had been turned down for a loan or offered less credit than they wanted in the past year.
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Source: CLEAR, The Economic Wellbeing of LGBTQ Adults in the U.S. in 2019 (June 2020)
After a legal name change, trans and gender nonconforming people experience myriad problems with their credit reports, including losing their credit history, drops in their credit score, and unfair denials for loans, rentals, and jobs because reports continue to include their former name, also referred to as their deadname.
Check out our one pagers about credit reporting issues for trans and nonbinary people after a legal name change:
Read our fact sheet about the unexpected challenges for trans & gender non-conforming individuals experience with their credit reports after a legal name change.
Read about the credit report issues one trans woman had with her credit reports and score after her legal name change.
Listen to our CLEAR Finance Chat podcast episode with Billie Simmons from Daylight about credit issues for trans and nonbinary people after a legal name change.
Today, 145 organizations sent a letter to the “Big Three” credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and Transunion) and to the Consumer Data Industry Association (CDIA), the
Earlier this year CLEAR reported how transgender and gender-nonconforming consumers who changed their legal name continued to struggle to update their names on their credit
Equifax announced today that trans and nonbinary consumers who have changed their legal name will now be able to request that the bureau change their
© 2021 – Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement & Research
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