Art Doesn't Ask for Permission. Neither Does Hope.
Here's something worth sitting with: the most radical thing you can do in a climate designed to make you feel small is to take up space. To show up. To put your name on something and say this is real, this is true, this exists, and you don't get to make it stop.
Hope Abbigail Nulf has been doing this her entire life, mostly without an audience. Now she's doing it with one.
Her debut book, Trans in the Time of Trump, arrives not quietly but deliberately as a first entry in a nine-book series built around Doodle, the character she first drew in 1977 as a young person in Battle Creek, Michigan, who had no framework yet for who she was. Doodle was born in private. She lived in sketchbooks for decades, absorbing Hope's inner world with humor and honesty and something that looks, in retrospect, remarkably like defiance. And now she's public. Loudly, proudly, politically public.
This is what resistance actually looks like when it comes from somewhere real. Not a strategy. Not a campaign. A woman who survived a hospitalization by picking up a pen. A woman who spent years in a world that didn't have a word for her, who found thirteen varsity letters in high school because she needed proof, any proof that she was worth something. A woman who transitioned in 2000 and found, at forty, the kind of friendship and happiness she'd almost stopped believing in. A woman who started sharing her drawings with her LGBTQ+ community a few years ago and discovered that people had been waiting, without knowing it, for exactly this.
The most radical thing you can do in a climate designed to make you feel small is to take up space. Hope Abbigail Nulf has been doing this her entire life. Now she's doing it with an audience.
When people talk about art as resistance, it can start to feel like a comfortable abstraction, a way of framing creative work that makes it sound braver than it is. But watch what happens when you track Hope's story from the beginning. From the hospital bed where she started drawing. Through the decades of keeping Doodle mostly to herself. Through the transition, the shifting family relationships, the mother who turned out to be the best person she knows, and the sister who stood beside her. Through the decision, four years ago, to share Doodle with the world. And now to this book, this pointed, political, fully-formed declaration that Doodle has always been building toward.
That's not an abstraction. That's a life becoming an argument. That's personal transformation turning itself outward and refusing to apologize for how much space it takes up.
Trans in the Time of Trump is not a book about quietly enduring. It is a book about the particular kind of courage that makes art in the middle of a fight, not to escape the fight, but to be more fully in it. Hope is a special education teacher. She has spent her career seeing the students who are hardest to see, who carry the most, and have the fewest people willing to carry it with them. Doodle was always, at some level, for those students. And now, in this political moment, Doodle is for everyone who needs proof that you can survive something that was supposed to break you and come out the other side still making things, still speaking, still here.
Eight more books are coming. Each one will go further into the territory Hope has been mapping since 1977. This is only the beginning of what Doodle has to say. And if the current political climate thinks that will stop her, well. It hasn't stopped Hope yet.