Re: Wildcards in mailmap to hide transgender people's deadnames

> Yes. The way that git models identity is flawed as it makes the 
> mistake in assuming names are constant attributes of a person. Of 
> course this is not true at all, people change names for all kinds of 
> reasons and in some countries close to half the population will change 
> their name over the course of their lifetime at least once, when they 
> marry. So this is not some woke issue, it's a long standing issue in 
> how men traditionally model identity in software systems. I'm a man 
> and I've made that mistake myself, it's a common blindspot.
>
> Git really should use some level of non cleartext indirection on 
> identity, and store that data outside of the change log. Then history 
> wouldn't need to be written to update someone's particulars and many 
> identity concerns would just go away.
>
> Arguably .mailmap is just a workaround for the mismatch between model 
> and reality and doesnt really solve the problems of names changing and 
> actually makes it worse. Really this should be fixed at a deeper 
> level. The trick I guess is how would one do that in a back compatible 
> way.
>
> Yves