On Toddler-Sized Driver's Licenses and Other State-Sanctioned Fictions

The DMV as a Low-Energy Performance Artist

A Reddit user recently discovered that their driver’s license lists their height as 2’0” instead of 5’7”. They have apparently been operating a motor vehicle for years under the official legal fiction that they are the size of a large toddler. The truly fascinating thing is not the error itself—errors happen—but the fact that this fiction was sustainable for so long. Think of it as a kind of performance art piece by the Department of Motor Vehicles, where the premise is: What if a member of the Lollipop Guild was legally permitted to drive a Nissan Sentra? And the brilliant twist is that no one, not the user, not a single bartender, bouncer, or TSA agent, ever broke the fourth wall[^1].

[^1]: The system worked, in the sense that it didn’t work at all, which is a form of working.

The Market for Lemons, But for Identity

This highlights a core principle of informational asymmetry: nobody actually checks the data. Your ID is not a testament to your vital statistics; it is a token that signals to other parties, “The state has vouched for this person, probably.” The bouncer at a bar isn’t measuring your height; he’s checking for a valid-looking plastic card and an age that suggests you won’t vomit in his establishment. The system is built on a shared, lazy trust in the process of ID creation, not the content. The content is just decorative text, like the Latin on a dollar bill.

A Litany of Bureaucratic Improv

The comments reveal this is not a one-off glitch but a feature of the system. One user’s birth certificate listed their gender as female. Another’s birthday was December 0th—a day that exists only in the liminal space between November and reality[^2]. The incentive for the DMV clerk is to process you, not to profile you. Their job is to move the line, not to engage in a philosophical debate about whether you, a six-foot-tall man with a beard, could plausibly be a two-foot-tall woman born on the zeroth day of Christmas.

[^2]: A day for those who are, administratively speaking, ageless.

The Joke That Writes Itself

Of course, the top comment is a perfect, witty payoff: “You been selling yourself short all these years.” This is the correct analysis. The market priced the user not on their actual height, but on the state’s flawed data. In the eyes of the law, they were two feet tall. This creates a fun thought experiment: if you are pulled over for a traffic violation and your license says you are 2’0”, could you argue you were too short to reach the pedals? The cop would have to either a) accept the state’s own documentation as fact, or b) admit the entire ID apparatus is a farce. It’s a checkmate.

The Efficient Markets Hypothesis, For Your Wallet

So what have we learned? The system is riddled with quiet, hilarious inaccuracies that no one has any incentive to correct. The ID is a permission slip, not a biography. And the most rational thing to do, upon discovering you are officially a hobbit, is to lean into the bit. Get a stepstool for your car. Apply for grants reserved for the vertically challenged. The state has given you a new, arbitrageable identity. The real FU would be to go back to the DMV and fix it.