Driver changes gender for cheaper insurance

An Alberta man has legally changed his gender purely to benefit from the lower car insurance rates offered to women.

“I didn’t feel like getting screwed over any more," the man, identified only as “David,” told CBC this week.

For more than three years, Alberta has been among several provinces in which residents can legally change the sex on their birth certificates without providing evidence of genital surgery.

Under a 2015 reform brought in by Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives, to change the gender on a birth certificate applicants need only provide a note from an accredited physician or psychologist indicating that they identify as a different sex.

“It was pretty simple. I just basically asked for it and told (the doctor) that I identify as a woman, or I’d like to identify as a woman, and he wrote me the letter I wanted,” David told CBC.

Once a birth certificate is amended, it’s then a simple process to have the change applied to an Alberta driver’s licence.

David noted in a post to Reddit last April that he would have paid $4,517 if he had insured his car as a man, but the cost dropped to $3,423 once he became a woman.

“I am now a woman … I now pay $1,100 less for auto insurance. I won. The end,” he wrote.

Alberta’s sex change requirements weren’t intended to help Albertans welch on their insurance premiums, of course, but rather to cut red tape for the transgender community. A statement at the time called it “a major step forward in supporting transgender individuals and their families.”

Nevertheless, it’s not the first time that a Canadian has used the new measures to legally change their sex for dubious reasons. In 2016, right-wing provocateur Lauren Southern legally changed her sex to male to mock similar regulatory changes in Ontario.

David’s Reddit post indicated that he was inspired by Southern, although he told CBC he did not intend to ridicule trans people. “I did it for cheaper car insurance,” he said.

Nevertheless, should he ever need to make any future insurance claims, David will need to maintain the fiction that he is a legitimate transgender person.

“I must say (for anyone who tries to report me) that I didn’t legally change my sex solely for cheaper auto insurance, though, that was and is a big factor for me and other people who suffer from gender-dysphoria,” he wrote in a disclaimer.

A 2012 study by InsureEye Inc. concluded that, on average, Canadian women pay five per cent less for auto insurance than men. Higher premiums for male drivers are standard for insurers across Canada and the United States. A notable exception is ICBC, the provincerun insurer in British Columbia. “In setting premiums, ICBC does not discriminate on the basis of age, sex or marital status,” said spokeswoman Lindsay Wilkins.

Men generally pay higher car insurance rates because they have a higher accident rate. In the United States, data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has concluded that men are roughly twice as likely to die in fatal car crashes as women. Rates of speeding, impaired driving and reckless driving are also higher among males.

Indeed, David’s insurance rates were particularly high in part because, despite only being in his early 20s, he already has a collision and several tickets on his driving record.