René Salinas Ramos is the 47-year-old father of two daughters. According to Ecuadorian law, however, Ramos is a woman. That’s because he legally changed his gender to female in an attempt to get custody of his daughters—he says that their mother is abusive, that she keeps the children from him, and that he hasn’t seen them in five months. According to Ramos, he is a victim of an Ecuadorian law that stipulates maternal custody if no agreement is reached.
“My actions are not against anyone in particular, but against the system,” Ramos told local outletLa Voz del Tomebamba. “Now I am also a mom. That’s how I consider myself. I am very sure of my sexuality. What I have sought is to give the love and protection that a mother can give her children. Now that I am a woman, I can be a mother and I am on equal footing to fight for the parental authority of my daughters.” His new identification card identifies him as a woman.
Transgender groups—who have long been proponents of “self-identification,” a process in which someone can identify as a different gender simply by applying to have their ID and paperwork changed—are now upset by this. As Mary Harrington of Unherd noted sarcastically: “’We want males who identify as women to be able to gain privileges reserved for women’…’Wait, no, not like that.’” In fact, Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Nationalist Party just finished a knock-down, drag-out fight to secure precisely this policy in Scotland at the urging of transgender groups.
The consequences of this have been obvious for awhile. Conservative provocateur Lauren Southern legally became a man on her driver’s license in Canada several years ago while filming the process just to illustrate how farcical and simple it is. In 2018, one Canadian man fed up with high car insurance prices legally changed his gender to get the cheaper female rate. And hilariously, a man who legally changed his gender to female in Michigan was outraged when his car insurance rates went up, insisting that this was all very unfair. Because we live in a stupid culture, these stories (which actually happened!) are reported seriously.
