She Survived. She Transitioned. Now She's Drawing Back.
There's a character named Doodle who has been living in Hope Abbigail Nulf's sketchbooks since 1977. For most of those years, Doodle existed quietly as a private language between Hope and herself, a way of making sense of a life that often didn't make sense at all.
That changed. And the timing, it turns out, is not a coincidence.
Hope's debut book, Trans in the Time of Trump, is the first in a planned nine-book series, and it arrives at a moment when the LGBTQ+ community is navigating one of the most politically hostile environments in recent American history. This isn't a book that arrived by accident. It arrived because Hope decided that silence was no longer an option.
The Art That Was Born from Pain
Hope is a special education teacher in Las Vegas, Nevada. She has been drawing since 1977. But the origin story of Doodle isn't a tidy one. It starts with a brutal beating that leaves her hospitalized. Art wasn't a hobby she picked up. It was survival.
Growing up in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the '60s and '70s, Hope carried something inside her that she had no language for. There was no trans community. No representation. No roadmap. What she had was athletics; she earned thirteen varsity letters in high school, and the stubborn, quiet belief that she was good at something, even when everything else felt impossible.
"Her art was born out of pain. After surviving a brutal beating that left her hospitalized, Hope began to draw as a way to make sense of her life."
In 2000, she transitioned. The life she had always been living on the inside finally had a shape on the outside. Family relationships shifted for the better, and her mother, Beverly Jo Henry, became something she describes as the best person she has ever known. Her sister Cynthia became a steadfast ally. And Doodle, the character she had been quietly drawing for decades, began to evolve alongside her.
When Personal Becomes Political
For most of her life, Hope kept Doodle close. It was only about four years ago that she began sharing the character publicly, first within her LGBTQ+ community, then wider. The response caught her off guard. People weren't just charmed. They were moved.
Because here's what Doodle is, underneath the humor and the ink and the personality: a mirror. A character who reflects the inner world of someone who spent years being told, implicitly and explicitly, that their inner world didn't count. Sharing that mirror publicly turned out to be an act of profound generosity and, for many readers, a profound relief.
Trans in the Time of Trump takes that personal language and turns it outward. The book is unapologetically political. It is, in Hope's own words, a declaration of resistance. What began as a small act of care drawing for her students, finding ways to reach kids who felt unseen, has grown into something larger: a statement that art can still speak truth to power, even when power is very, very loud.
Why Art? Why Now?
It's worth pausing on this question, because Hope's answer to it is more layered than it might first appear.
Art, for Hope, has never been decorative. It has been functional in the most urgent sense; it helped her survive her adolescence, process her transition, and make meaning out of experiences that resisted any other form of understanding. When she talks about art as resistance, she's not speaking in metaphors. She's speaking from a life where that has been literally true.
And right now, with trans rights under systematic political attack, with visibility feeling both more necessary and more dangerous than ever, the choice to make Doodle public to put her story and her character and her politics into a book is itself an act of courage. A small act, maybe. But small acts from enough people tend to add up to something.
What's Coming
This is the first of nine Doodle books. Each one promises to go deeper into the political and personal territory that Hope has been mapping since 1977: activism, identity, resistance, the complicated, irreducible experience of being trans in America at this particular moment in history.