Book #98 of 2022:
Burn the Page: A True Story of Torching Doubts, Blazing Trails, and Igniting Change by Danica Roem
Danica Roem makes it all look easy. As the first openly transgender person to be elected to a U.S. state legislature, the Virginia delegate has faced considerable transphobia (and misplaced homophobia) lobbed against her, as well as opposition dirt based on her time fronting a heavy metal group and its accompanying party lifestyle. And yet she seems to take these difficulties in stride, citing her experience as a journalist for her ability to dissociate from the cruelty of personal attacks and remain laser-focused on the issues that matter to her constituents. People in her district — or a neighboring county, like me — know her as a tireless advocate for expanded school lunch programs, LGBTQ+ rights, and improvements to local transportation, particularly that bugbear of Northern Virginia traffic that is State Route 28. She’s also remarkably accessible to voters, forging strong connections in her door-to-door individualized campaigning and even giving out her private cell phone number with an earnest request for folks to call her if there’s any way her office can help.
(And she liked and replied to my untagged tweet that mentioned I was starting this book, so I assume that she either has automated alerts set up or is regularly searching for her name online, and that she will thus at some point be reading this review. Hi, Danica! Love your work, truly.)
In this memoir, the author shares an extensive look at a past she acknowledges is messy, as well as the moral outlook that has guided her time in politics. It’s like no politician’s autobiography I’ve ever read before, simply because Roem herself is so distinctive electorally (although thankfully growing less so as the number of elected trans officials continues to rise). She is forthright about her coming-of-gender story, her sexual history, and her indiscretions with alcohol, which is refreshing not only for someone in an often-sanitized public position, but also as a reader in the same approximate age cohort whose own life is documented on the internet in a way older generations have never had to face. Not everyone would be this brave, but the writer’s approach is to own it all, some parts even proactively, and trust that her platform and track record of results will count more for anyone turned off by anything in her background. It’s honestly not the worst lesson that the left could have learned from the unexpected success of Donald Trump in 2016, a year before Roem entered her first race.
This particular publication is organized by theme rather than chronology, which means that the timeline periodically loops back on itself in a way that’s a little difficult to follow and introduces artificial divisions among various elements in the delegate’s career. There are sections on coming out as a woman, going to therapy, meeting her partner, touring with the band, reporting on local corruption, challenging the bathroom-bill bigot who held his seat for a quarter-century before her, and so on, and it’s sometimes hard to remember / track exactly what happened for her when. But Danica’s voice shines loud and clear throughout, and makes me proud to support her both in her present role that she’s won thrice now and as a newly-announced candidate for the state senate. While she gives no mention here of any dreams of even higher office, I see only bright things ahead in her future.
[Content warning for suicide, domestic abuse, and sexual assault.]
★★★★☆
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