Equally true of your driver’s license, unless the person you present it to is the same one who issued it to you and has known you the whole time. But no one takes just a birth certificate as an identity document, so this is a straw man.

Have you ever been employed? The I-9 requires proof of identity and proof of work eligibility. The US birth certificate is listed as a document that proves work eligibility but you need a different document for identity. The SAVE Act, for that reason, requires something else to prove identity if you use a birth certificate for citizenship.

At one level it could be even more tenuous, as you probably have that initial BC copy in part because your parents (or your “parents”) told you that you were their child… and you had no reason not to believe them*. Thus DNA really does or will end up being the core ID source eventually – but even that has to reply on the proper identification of the people supplying the DNA sample as being well established (along with om’s chain of custody).

But at the other end the reliance is really on the “full faith and credit” of the city or state organization/ institution obtaining and recording and storing that data. If they want to count us as citizens and tax us and pass laws that we are expected to follow, then they better also be sufficiently rigorous in maintaining a reliable source of birth identity.

*In my case I am pretty sure I am not a bastard or adopted because after a 7th grade parent-teacher conference, my teacher told me she could recognize my father because I resembled him so closely.

To get certified copy of my California birth certificate, good for identification, I had to sign that testimony (the BC request form) in the presence of a notary, and present my ID, a RealID drivers license, to her so she could certify that (the named person) had signed.

Without that testimony and the notary, the copies would have been marked “Not for Identification.” (I’ve gotten those too, to document genealogy.)

And in response to Niketas, this didn’t “occur to me just now.” It’s been obvious to me for more than a decade, at least from the time I was having discussions with the friend who actually wrote the RealID Act as a House staffer.

Consider that married women taking their husbands’ names are underrepresented in the demographic spreading this lie, it makes sense. A lot of them probably just don’t know that women who have changed their names when they married have been navigating this from the beginning and that our legal system knows how to cope with it.

They do, info at the link, which is why I linked it.

Identity and proof of qualifying relationship documentation is required.