I AM SEAN: A Dystopian Warning About Trans Rights

In a near-future America, being transgender becomes a crime disguised as compassion.

Sarah Mitchell is eight years old when she first realizes something is wrong—not with her, but with how the world sees her. On the basketball court, wearing her jersey with number 7 on the back, she feels right for the first time. But it will take years before she finds the word for what she is, and the name that fits: Sean.

By the time Sean is a teenager, the world is changing around him. A charismatic senator named James Graves rises to power on a platform of protecting children from gender ideology. His rhetoric is measured, his tone compassionate. He doesn't sound like a monster. That's what makes him dangerous.

When Graves wins the presidency, he signs the Gender Health Protection Act into law. Overnight, being transgender becomes classified as Gender Identity Disorder—a mental illness requiring mandatory psychiatric treatment. A ten-thousand-dollar bounty incentivizes neighbors, coworkers, and even family members to report suspected cases. Trans people across the country are rounded up and sent to treatment facilities that promise healing and hope.

At eighteen, Sean has been living a double life—working construction under his chosen name during the day, returning to his parents' house as Sarah at night. It's the only way to survive. But when a workplace accident exposes his secret, he's reported, captured, and transported to the Maryland Regional Gender Health Center in the remote town of Maddox—just forty miles from Washington, DC.

Inside, Sean discovers the horrifying truth behind the propaganda. The smiling patients on TV are actors. The evidence-based care is starvation, forced medication, and psychological torture. The guards are ex-cops fired for brutality. The medical staff had their licenses revoked for malpractice. And patients who resist treatment disappear into Ward F, never to return.

Stripped of his identity, dressed in pink scrubs, and called by his deadname, Sean refuses to break. As he connects with other patients—Jordan, Alexis, Kai, River, and Beth—he begins planning the impossible: an escape that will allow him to reach DC and expose the truth about what's really happening inside America's compassionate treatment centers.

But in a system designed to erase trans people from existence, resistance comes at the ultimate cost.

I AM SEAN is a devastating near-future dystopian novel about identity, resistance, and the power of choosing who you are—even when the world demands you be someone else. It's a warning about how easily compassionate-sounding rhetoric can mask genocide, and a memorial to those erased by systems that claimed to help them.