One Drawing at a Time: How Doodle Became an Act of Defiance
Let's be honest about the moment we're in.
For trans Americans, the political landscape right now is not abstract; it is personal, immediate, and in many cases, dangerous. Rights are being rolled back. Visibility is being weaponized. The institutions that were supposed to protect everyone are making clear, repeatedly and loudly, that they don't consider everyone worth protecting.
In that climate, Hope Abbigail Nulf published a book.
That is not a coincidence. That is the point.
Who Hope Is and Why It Matters
Hope Abbigail Nulf is a special education teacher in Las Vegas, Nevada. She has spent her career working with students who feel unseen, unheard, and underestimated, students whose experiences don't fit neatly into the categories that schools were designed around. She knows, from both sides, what it is to be that student.
She grew up in a time and a place where being trans was not a concept that existed in public conversation. What she felt, she felt alone. The violence she survived in those years, including a severe enough beating to hospitalize her, was processed not through therapy or community support, but through drawing. Doodle was the result.
"In a time when we must all stand up against tyranny, Doodle reminds us that art can still speak truth to power."
She transitioned in 2000. She found, at forty, the kind of friendship and happiness she had spent her whole life not quite believing was available to her. She began sharing Doodle with her LGBTQ+ community a few years ago, and the response was heartwarming. People responded to a character who reflected something true about navigating the world as someone whose identity has always been contested
What "Resistance Through Art" Actually Means
This phrase gets used a lot. Art as resistance. Creative expression as protest. And sometimes it can feel hollow, like a way of making something feel more important than it is, or of avoiding the harder political work.
But here's what it looks like when it's real: a woman who spent decades surviving a world that didn't have space for her, who created a character to hold what she couldn't say out loud, who spent years building the courage to share that character publicly, and who now at a moment when the political attacks on her community are intensifying refuses to go quiet.
That's what resistance through art looks like when it isn't a slogan. It looks like Hope Abbigail Nulf is publishing Trans in the Time of Trump. It looks like Doodle, which started as a private act of survival, has become a public declaration.
Why the Timing Is Deliberate
Trans in the Time of Trump is the first of nine planned Doodle books. The series is explicitly political. Hope has described it as a declaration of resistance, a series built around the conviction that now, of all times, is when these stories need to be told, and these images need to be seen.
She's right. And here's why: visibility matters. Not in the abstract, feel-good sense. In the very specific sense that when trans people are visible when they are three-dimensional, when their stories include humor and complexity and pain and triumph and politics all at once, it becomes harder to reduce them to a talking point. It becomes harder to legislate against an abstraction when the abstraction is, actually, a woman who drew her way through a hospitalization and became a teacher and raised a character named Doodle from pain into joy.
What You Can Do
If you're part of the LGBTQ+ community, this book is for you, not as consolation, but as fuel. Because that's what Hope intends it to be.
If you're an ally, this book is also for you because understanding the full, complicated, deeply human reality of what's at stake is the only way to show up for it meaningfully.
And if you're someone who has ever felt that your story was too messy, too political, too much, this book is especially for you. Because that's who Hope was drawing for all along.