October 2028.
America is on pins and needles waiting for the November election, which pits President Kamala Harris against the Republican governor of Vermont, bringing intense media attention to the tiny state.
President Harris, who ascended in January 2023 when President Biden resigned for health reasons, won a full term in 2024. Irregularities and polling discrepancies mean that nobody, not even on the Left, is certain about what happened on Election Night 2024, or what might happen this time around.
The social slope that Wokeness was taking America down in 2021 has only accelerated. Every high school requires social justice activism hours to graduate, and most 10-year-olds get puberty blockers, better known as “pause pills,” as gifts at their tenth birthday parties. When they turn sixteen, kids decide which puberty they want to go through, and those choosing a cross-sex identity become eligible for surgery, regardless of what their parents think. Even many red state parents participate in pausing, though fewer than in blue states, where the practice is nearly universal and parents who refuse face investigation by child protective services.
Critical legal theory, instituted in 2025, means that (at least in blue states), only white men are eligible to be charged with murder, and no transwoman can be charged with rape. Murder and rape are crimes that invoke a power imbalance, and blue state prosecutors are too enlightened to charge those without power for crimes that require it.
David and Miranda Riley live in Orleans County, Vermont, with their daughter, Heather, and her baby brother, Sam. When COVID shut down their lives during Heather’s second year of life, they decided to become as self-sustaining as possible. With a small group of friends, they pool resources and homeschool their kids, but even many in this group believe in the necessity of “pausing.”
David and Miranda don’t.
Heather’s tenth birthday is nine days before the election.
Her parents are going public with their decision, and all hell is going to break loose.
This is a work of fiction, inspired by my experiences amongst the Woke in general and some moms I know in real life who are seriously considering putting their non-gender-dysphoric kids on puberty blockers, just in case, in particular.
It will be published in serial fashion starting in January 2022. Paid subscribers will get early access to each release, but everyone will be able to read it, paid or not.