Inside Trans in the Time of Trump: What Hope Abbigail Nulf's Debut Book Actually Says and Why It Says It Now
When Hope Abbigail Nulf first put pen to paper and drew Doodle in 1977, she was not thinking about publication. She was thinking about survival. Nearly five decades later, the character that kept her company through one of the hardest lives imaginable has become the center of a debut book that is funny, political, personal, and for the community it speaks to and the moment it speaks into profoundly necessary.
Trans in the Time of Trump is not a memoir in the traditional sense, nor a conventional illustrated book. It is something harder to categorize and more interesting for it: a work of activist art in which the character of Doodle serves as both the narrator and the argument. Doodle reflects Hope's inner world, her humor, her politics, her grief, her defiance, her resilience, and in doing so, she reflects something that many readers will recognize as their own.
Doodle is not just a character. She is a record of what it looks like to survive something, transform because of it, and refuse to pretend it didn't happen.
What the Book Contains
At its core, Trans in the Time of Trump is a visual and emotional reckoning with what it means to be trans in America under the current political administration, not in the abstract, policy-paper sense, but in the daily, lived, sometimes absurd and sometimes devastating sense that Hope knows from the inside. The book uses Doodle's distinctive visual language, developed over nearly fifty years, to explore themes of identity, resistance, humor in the face of hostility, and the particular kind of courage required to be visibly yourself when visibility is being weaponized against you.
The tone is not uniformly heavy. Hope has always understood that humor is one of the most powerful tools in any activist's kit, that laughter does not minimize pain but can make it bearable, can make it shareable, can turn something that isolates into something that connects. Doodle has always carried both the weight of a life that was hard and the lightness of a person who found her way through it and came out the other side still making things, still laughing, still drawing.
Readers will find in the book a character who does not ask for sympathy. She asks for a witness. She asks to be seen in full, the humor and the anger, the joy and the grief, the political and the personal, all of it at once, because that is what real life actually looks like and because sanitizing it would be the one thing Doodle would never allow.
Why This Book Arrives Now
The timing of Trans in the Time of Trump is not incidental. Hope has watched, in real time and from inside her own community, the legislative and cultural assault on trans lives that has intensified over recent years. As a special education teacher, she works daily with students who are navigating a world that is actively working to make them feel less safe, less seen, and less valid. As a trans woman, she lives that reality herself.
The decision to publish now to make Doodle's story public and political at this specific moment is itself a statement. It says that the appropriate response to a climate of erasure is not silence. It says that art made from lived experience has a particular kind of staying power that fear-based policy does not. And it says, with the full weight of nearly fifty years of drawing behind it, that Doodle is not going anywhere.
The Character at the Heart of It
Doodle was born in 1977 from pain, specifically, from the aftermath of a beating that left Hope hospitalized and from the longer, quieter pain of growing up as someone with no language for who she was in a time and place that offered none. She evolved through Hope's transition in 2000, through the discovery of community and joy at forty, through four years of being shared publicly within LGBTQ+ spaces where people responded with something close to relief.
She is not a simple character. She is not a mascot or a symbol. She is the most honest thing Hope Abbigail Nulf has ever made, and that honesty is what makes her, in the end, an act of resistance. Because honesty, real, full, undefended honesty about who you are and what you have been through, is the one thing that the forces working against trans visibility cannot manufacture and cannot take away. Trans in the Time of Trump is where that honesty goes fully public. It is the first of nine books. If you want to understand what Doodle is and what Hope is building, this is where to start.