A Declaration of Resistance Born from Nearly Five Decades of Drawing
Hope Abbigail Nulf, a special education teacher, artist, and LGBTQ+ advocate, announced the publication of Trans in the Time of Trump, her debut book and the first in a planned nine-book series built around Doodle, a character she first drew in 1977 and has spent nearly five decades bringing to life.
The book arrives at a moment that Hope did not choose by accident. With trans rights under sustained political attack and visibility feeling both more necessary and more dangerous than at any recent point in American history, Trans in the Time of Trump is an unapologetically political work one that uses art, humor, and unflinching honesty to push back against a cultural and legislative climate that has made clear it would prefer LGBTQ+ voices to be smaller, quieter, and less present.
It is not smaller. It is not quieter. It is not less present. That is entirely the point.
"In a time when we must all stand up against tyranny, Doodle reminds us that art can still speak truth to power." Hope Abbigail Nulf
Doodle was not created for this book. She was created in 1977, when Hope was a young person in Battle Creek, Michigan, who had no language yet for who she was, no community to turn to, and no roadmap for a life that felt, in every quiet and unspoken way, like it belonged to someone else. Drawing was a survival. Doodle was the character who could exist on paper when existence anywhere else felt impossible.
Over the decades that followed through violence, Hope survived, through years of athletic achievement that gave her early proof of her own worth, through her transition in 2000, through the finding of true friendship and joy at forty, Doodle evolved alongside her. A character born of pain gradually became a character born of joy. And when Hope began sharing Doodle publicly about four years ago, first within her LGBTQ+ community in Las Vegas and then more broadly, the response confirmed what she had perhaps always suspected: people had been waiting for this character without knowing it.