The Drawing That Refused to Stay Private
I want to tell you about a character named Doodle, and why she matters right now more than she ever has before. But to do that, I need to start somewhere else. I need to start with what it feels like to carry something for a very long time before you're ready to share it.
Hope Abbigail Nulf has been drawing doodles since 1977. That's not a typo. Nearly five decades of a character living in sketchbooks, evolving, absorbing experiences, holding a world that was, for most of those years, too complicated and too contested to exist openly anywhere else. For Hope, Doodle wasn't a hobby or a creative project. She was a survival strategy.
Art was the place where Hope could be honest when everything else required her to be something she wasn't.
Hope grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the '60s and '70s. She was a boy, officially, in the way that the world around her insisted on. But she was also something else entirely, something for which there was no language available to her at the time, no community, no mirror in any book or classroom or conversation. What she had was a pen. And eventually, she had Doodle.
Art was the place where Hope could be honest when everything else required her to be something she wasn't. Doodle wasn't a hobby. She was a survival strategy.
The years before her transition in 2000 were not easy ones. She endured violence, including a beating that hospitalized her, and carried a weight of self-blame that took years to put down. She found what solid ground she could in athletics: thirteen varsity letters in high school, because when the world doesn't give you proof that you matter, you find proof wherever you can. Sport gave her that. Drawing gave her the rest.
When she transitioned, things shifted. Her mother, Beverly Jo Henry, who Hope describes as one of the few true Christians she has ever met, a woman who was, in her words, "woke" long before most of the country woke up, became something extraordinary. The best person she knows. Her sister Cynthia stood beside her. And Doodle, the character she had been drawing in private for so long, began to change alongside her, softening from something born of pain into something born of joy.
It was about four years ago that Hope began sharing Doodle publicly, first within her LGBTQ+ community in Las Vegas, then more broadly. She wasn't sure what to expect. What she found was that people needed Doodle in ways she hadn't fully anticipated. Because a character who holds humor and pain and politics and personality all at once, who reflects the inner life of someone who has had to fight for the right to simply exist, turns out to be rare. And rare, when it's also true, is healing.
Her debut book, Trans in the Time of Trump, is the first in a planned nine-book series. It is explicitly political, deliberately timed, and rooted in the conviction that art can still speak truth to power even now, maybe especially now, when power is very loud and very hostile and very convinced of its own permanence. Hope is not convinced. Doodle is not convinced. And the book they've made together is the evidence.
If you've ever kept something hidden because the world didn't seem ready for it, if you've ever found a private way to survive a public world that didn't have space for you, then this book is going to feel like someone opened a window in a room you'd forgotten had walls. That's what Doodle does. That's what she has always been for.
The difference now is that she's doing it out in the open. And that makes all the difference.