[gcr]

This is a common scenario for trans people who want to keep their previous identities secret for safety reasons. Git does not handle committer name changes by design, but I certainly wish there was some way of handling this scenario somehow. It’s not clear to me how one would maintain project provenance while allowing this use case.

When I changed my name, I submitted a PR to change it in the CONTRIBUTORS file of a project I had fixed a bug for. The approver privately reached out to me and offered to coordinate a global history rewrite among the core devs on my behalf. I declined because I don’t have that sort of safety need, but I’m incredibly grateful that there are maintainers out there who would be willing to go out of their way for something like that to help a non-core dev out.