What Happens When You Stop Hiding the Thing That Saved You
Most of us have something we've kept to ourselves for too long. A truth we've circled. A part of ourselves we've shown only in half-light, only to people we trusted completely, only in moments when the risk felt manageable.
For Hope Abbigail Nulf, that thing was Doodle.
She started drawing this character in 1977. She was going through something she had no words for, living as a boy when she was, in every way that mattered, something else entirely. Art became the place where she could let that something else exist. Doodle was a character who reflected her inner world when her outer world offered no reflection at all.
She kept Doodle mostly private for decades. And then, about four years ago, she didn't anymore. That decision, quiet, personal, and slightly terrifying, turned out to matter a great deal more than she expected.
The Thing About Surviving
Before we talk about the book, it's worth talking about what came before it. Because Hope's story is not a gentle one, and she doesn't ask you to treat it as such.
She grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the 1960s and '70s, in an era and a place where the concept of being transgender simply didn't exist in public conversation. She endured violence. She carried a weight of self-blame that took years to put down. She found refuge, briefly and fiercely, in athletics, with thirteen varsity letters, because she needed proof that she was good at something, and that was the proof available to her.
"She needed proof that she was good at something. Athletics gave her thirteen varsity letters. Art gave her Doodle. Both, in their own way, saved her life."
She transitioned in 2000. What that process looked like for her, the family relationships that shifted, the grief, and the relief, and the slow, complicated work of becoming more fully yourself, is woven through everything she creates. Her mother, Beverly Jo Henry, became the person she most admires in the world: a woman who was, in Hope's words, "woke" long before the country caught up. Her sister Cynthia stood beside her. These relationships matter to her art because her art has never been separate from her life.
The Turning Point
When Hope began sharing Doodle publicly at first within LGBTQ+ spaces, then more broadly, she discovered something she hadn't fully anticipated: other people needed this character.
Not because Doodle told them what to think or handed them easy answers. But because seeing a character who carried humor and insight and genuine personality alongside real pain and real politics that turns out to be rare. And people who have spent their lives feeling like their experience was too complicated, too political, too much, responded to Doodle with something close to relief.
That response changed what Hope understood herself to be doing. What had started as a private survival drawing to make sense of a life that was hard to make sense of had become something communal. A shared language. A space where people could feel less alone.
Doodle Goes Political
Trans in the Time of Trump, Hope's debut book, is the first in a planned series of nine. It is not a soft book. It doesn't soften its politics or its anger or its awareness of what is happening to trans people in America right now. It is, as Hope describes it, a declaration of resistance, the natural evolution of what she started drawing in 1977, finally ready to say what it has always been trying to say.
For Hope, this isn't a departure from personal storytelling. It is personal storytelling. Her experience of being trans in America under the current political climate isn't abstract. It is immediate, felt, and daily. Doodle is the character she created to hold all of that, and now Doodle holds it in public, where it can do the most good.
What This Is Really About
At its core, Hope's story and Doodle's story are about what happens when you stop hiding the thing that saved you. When you take the private act of survival and make it visible. When you trust that your truth, which felt for so long like a burden, might actually be a gift to someone who needs it.
Not everyone has thirteen varsity letters or a mother like Beverly Jo Henry or decades of sketchbooks to draw on. But most people have been through something. Most people have found a way to get through it, and they've kept mostly quiet.
Hope is making the case through Doodle, through this book, through every drawing she shares that the quiet doesn't have to stay quiet. That your story, told honestly, is an act of resistance all on its own.