On Monday, a poster on Reddit who claims to be a driver in Alberta says they saved more than $1,000 on auto insurance premiums by legally changing their sex from male to female on their birth certificate.

The author of the post, Anotherlink421, is in their early twenties, has received multiple speeding tickets, and has been in one minor car accident. When they’d initially approached a broker in Alberta to buy insurance for a new car, those factors added up to a quoted premium of $4,517.

But, when the author asked what the quote would be if they applied as a female driver, the insurer came back with a substantially reduced rate of $3,423. That’s $1,094 cheaper than the original quote, which had been calculated for a male driver.

“I began asking more questions and digging deeper into what would happen to my auto-policy if I did change my gender,” wrote Anotherlink421.

According to their post, the author decided to legally change their sex from male to female after the quote. This is where things get murky.

Would changing sex from male to female really get you a big discount?

In their post, Anotherlink421 noted that they did not legally change their sex solely to get access to lower auto insurance rates. Instead, the decision was primarily made to address their gender dysphoria.

But a look at the author’s past posts on Reddit — most of which the author has deleted, but are still accessible via digital archive Wayback Machine — tell a different story.

An archived post by the author in the subreddit r/MensRights, which dates back to mid-March, details the author’s plans to legally change their gender on their birth certificate solely to get access to cheaper insurance — and to make the point that “us men are still being discriminated against greatly when it comes to Auto Insurance.”

Anotherlink421, who previously appears to have been a regular contributor to r/MensRights and the alt-right, Donald Trump-supporting subreddit r/The_Donald, has since deleted the post, but comments on the thread — which offer advice on how the author can “beat the fuggin system” — remain online.

Deleting their posting history and being misleading about their intentions raises some red flags about their claims. LowestRates.ca reached out to the author via Reddit to explain the discrepancy. We haven't received a response yet, but we'll update this post if we do.

Discrepancies aside, a male driver receiving a much different quote than a female driver with an otherwise similar profile can and does happen.

Many insurers in Canada take a driver’s sex into account when determining their auto insurance rates. Because insurers tend to charge women lower rates, the practice has been criticized by some as discriminating against men.

Insurers have typically countered such criticisms by citing statistics which show that, on average, male drivers get into more accidents than female drivers. This means male clients cost insurers more to insure and should therefore be charged comparatively higher premiums, they argue.

In Ontario, all auto insurers set rates at least partially based on a driver’s sex.

How sex-based pricing works in Alberta

But in Alberta, where Anotherlink421 is based, insurance works a little differently.

Alberta insurers do not automatically consider sex in their rate calculations, confirms Adam Mitchell, president of insurance brokerage firm Mitchell and Whale. As a matter of fact, most of the time, insurers in the province overlook demographic data — e.g., statistics on the sex, age, and location demographics to which a driver belongs — altogether.

And, in the case that an insurer does offer rates based on a driver’s sex, Alberta insurance law will only allow them to do so for drivers under the age of 25, says a spokesperson at insurance company Cypher Systems.

“For drivers under 25, gender is used as a rating factor because statistically, there is a difference between young males and young females as to how they drive,” the spokesperson explains.

When a driver asks for an auto insurance quote in Alberta, insurers are required to consider two rates: grid rates (which are capped rates set by the province), and non-grid rates (rates set by the insurance companies themselves). Grid rates are based only on a driver’s personal driving record and insurance history — not demographic factors like age and sex.

Meanwhile, non-grid rates, which are calculated using an insurer’s in-house algorithm, may take a driver’s sex into account — but, again, only when the driver is under the age of 25.

Insurers then have to offer drivers the lower of the two rates.

If Anotherlink421 was being offered two differently priced rates — one for a male driver, and another for a female driver — they were being offered non-grid rates, and not grid rates. “Otherwise, [the male and female rates] would be the same,” confirms Joanne Lemna, CEO at Alberta and Saskatchewan-based A-Win Insurance.

But many drivers — especially ones with cleaner driving records — are offered grid rates, which are not calculated based on sex.

And, when all Alberta drivers, including Anotherlink421, reach their 25th birthdays, sex will no longer affect their auto insurance rates at all — whether they’re offered a non-grid rate or not.

Would the discount actually be so large — more than $1,000?

This is hard to say. When we ran the author’s situation into our own quoter — estimating a 23-year old driver with one minor accident, and two speeding tickets — we got a difference of $605 for a male versus a female driver in the same situation.

The Cypher Systems spokesperson says any difference more than $1,000 seems high, but still within the realm of possibility. “In my experience, the younger the operator, the more the premium could be affected by gender,” he told LowestRates.ca. “It does seem like a large difference in price, but it’s not impossible for the rates to be that different between two classes.”

Nonetheless, eliminating gender-based pricing specifically — as opposed to demographics-based pricing in general — would not necessarily stamp out this discrepancy.

In 2011, the European Union banned gender-based pricing for all insurance products so that insurers could no longer automatically charge men higher rates.

But, by 2017, the gap between what male and female drivers were paying in premiums widened even further, since men still had a higher tendency to get into accidents.