If you ever want to change your name on your commits, say you have been married, divorced or chosen a name more congruent with your gender identity What? It's

If you ever want to change your name on your commits, say you have been married, divorced or chosen a name more congruent with your gender identity What? It's a quirk of git and mercurial that author identities based on name+email are part of the history itself. There could be a model where authors have a unique ID maintained independently of the history (every new name+email pair gets a uuid, you can update what your uuid points to somewhere else, etc). Conflating the global "Name <email>" format as a conspiracy against non-white-males is a bit out there. the majority of people who get a name change are going to be married/divorced women. It has probably never crossed the minds of the creators of Git that this could be such a huge problem to a non-cis or non-male person. What? If you wrote a book before getting married do you go back, collect all sold copies, and rewrite your name? open themselves up to discrimination if they are forced to reveal their trans status by disclosing their assigned at birth name. What? Commit author names and addresses are completely arbitrary, unchecked, and answer to no authority. Make it up as you go along. There are a lot of people using GitHub who use fully anonymous names and have no discernible gender or race. As a wise man once said, "show me the code." Another option is to use a handle/pseudonym. This is also fraught with problems. ... this can come across as unprofessional to many current and future employers. What? Using online nicks isn't unprofessional to people who employ programmers. It's normal to be a series of random names online. Being fully anonymous online was actually encouraged before some entitled boarding school kid decided he wanted to rule the world by invading everybody's privacy. This has personally affected me. Just another example of how a seemingly small, normative assumption can have profound negative effects on minorities. Interesting, but this is more against a policy of ever naming anything and against ever keeping any records for anything ever. Life sucks, the past sucks, we can't always rewrite our past, but we can outgrow it and become better and stronger and faster in the future to suppress, outgrow, and make irrelevant prior pains. But, as far as Git goes, it does have a way of accumulating same same but different name/email pairs from the history and treating them as one unified identity: http://git-scm.com/docs/git-shortlog#_mapping_authors http://git-scm.com/docs/git-shortlog#_mapping_authors — example: https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/.mailmap https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/.mailmap