What's It To You?
"None of your business" has apparently lost its meaning

ELIZABETH GEORGE
Mar 24, 2026

Recently, the Federal Government sent out 20 subpoenas to hospitals, clinics, and doctors who provide to individuals what is called “gender affirming care.” The government’s apparent concern was ascertaining which among these 20 hospitals, clinics, and doctors were providing such care to minors. Seattle Children’s Hospital received one of the subpoenas as did Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Children’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital Colorado, and Children’s National Hospital. The subpoena did not merely query whether such treatment was being given, however. Instead the subpoena demanded the following:

The names of the patients being treated as well as their addresses and their social security numbers; all diagnoses made regarding these patients; the patients’ insurance details; all prescriptions written for these patients. Additional information about staff members was also requested.

Some people will argue that the government is only doing this to keep children safe. After all, they will say, not long ago our president declared that American children are going to school as one gender and returning home as the other, and why would our president say something so outrageous if he did not know it to be the truth? I can’t answer that question, but I do suggest that together we look at this subpoena situation in another way, setting aside the idea of truth, lies, and children’s safety. I’d like to suggest that we look at it through the lens of the government’s attempt to locate transgender children. Locating them makes it far easier to round them up…should things ever come to that.

Of course, some people will scoff at the very idea of our government ever rounding people up, saying that we don’t do that in this country. Others will say that, in this country, we don’t arrest people and put them into concentration camps. Still others will say that those arrested doubtless deserve to be arrested. And anyway, at least we don’t call the places they’re being taken concentration camps since that term—concentration camps—smacks of Nazi Germany and we are not Nazi Germany. We do not round up homosexuals, Romas, political dissidents, journalists, artists, writers, and Jews.

I may be sinking into paranoia, but it seems to me that there’s a larger governmental plan at work when subpoenas are sent out demanding information about individual citizens. It seems to me that people who refuse to see this are suffocating from the sand into which they have thrust their heads. They’re telling themselves that nothing’s happening, when it’s actually happening right before their eyes. They’re going about their lives—shopping, dining, ferrying their children around, taking family holidays, going to films and buying popcorn to munch upon in equal parts diversion and bliss—and if harm is falling upon someone’s head, there’s probably a good reason for that. And in any case, harm is certainly not falling on theirs.

What I don’t understand about this latest wrinkle in the governmental blanket of identify, punish, conquer, and control is the why of it. After all, the government comprises people. It cannot exist otherwise. So why do some of these individuals involved in the government care about what other individuals not in the government are doing with their lives if they’re not harming others?

For example, if someone is transgender, what on earth does that have to do with me? What does it have to do with you? When you reduce it as much as you can, what does it have to do with anyone at all save that individual? Are you being harmed if someone is transgender? Is anyone else being harmed if someone is transgender? You might argue that being transgender (or homosexual or lesbian or bisexual or asexual) is “against God’s law.” You might declare that the person who is any of the aforementioned “aberrations of nature” is on the slippery slope to hell. So? What’s that have to do with you? You might declare that it’s your duty as a whatever-you-want-to-claim-to-be (Servant of God, Master of the Universe, Almighty Poobah of All Species) to save these benighted individuals, but why do you believe you have that duty?

This is what perplexes me today: that someone can think it’s his or her right not only to sit in judgment of people they do not even know, not only to trumpet their judgment of those people to others, but also to attempt through lawmaking to control the decisions these individuals make about how to live their own lives. I simply cannot get my head around this.

I find that I’m rendered inarticulate today. I apologize for this. I think my problem right now is that it’s beginning to sink into my skull that no matter how bad things are under the reign of Donald Trump and the gutless grovelers in his Cabinet and in Congress, they can always get worse, and the way it’s looking, that’s probably the case. So I reach the only conclusion I can when I consider what I’ve written today: If we do nothing to protest what’s being done in the name of making America “great”, then we are actually taking part in what’s being done in the name of making America “great.” I can’t do that and I won’t do that, so I do what I can: I write and I join the next and latest march in the streets of Seattle. I hold onto the hope that those people happily sitting on the sidelines, secure in the baseless idea that nothing will ever happen to them, will awaken to the evil being done in their names. For we’ve reached the point now at which there are only two sides in this battle to determine what kind of America we’re going to have: on one side are those who through inaction and silence comfortably accept what Donald Trump and his vermin associates are doing and on the other side are those who through actions and words declare that they will accept nothing save what is declared ours in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

There are those two sides. There is no other. We’ve lost the middle ground, if it ever existed at all.

© 2026 Elizabeth George
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104