She Started Drawing to Survive. Forty-Eight Years Later, the Drawing Is Fighting Back.
There is a version of Hope Abbigail Nulf's story that could be told as a triumph-over-adversity narrative: the child who endured violence, who found proof of her worth in athletic achievement, who transitioned at forty and found happiness and community and a life that finally fit. That version is true. It is also, on its own, incomplete.
Because what the triumph-over-adversity version leaves out is Doodle, the character Hope has been drawing since 1977, who lived for decades in private sketchbooks before being shared with the world, and who now anchors Trans in the Time of Trump, Hope's debut book and the first of nine. Doodle is not the happy ending of Hope's story. She is the thread running through all of it, born in the hardest part, transformed through the turning points, and arriving here, now, in 2025, as a political statement at a moment that demands exactly one.
"Her art was born out of pain. After surviving a brutal beating that left her hospitalized, Hope began to draw as a way to make sense of her life."
Battle Creek to Las Vegas: The Long Road to Publication
Hope grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the 1960s and '70s, a time and place where being trans was not a concept in public circulation. She carried something she had no name for, felt something she had no community to help her understand, and found survival where she could. Thirteen varsity letters in high school. A pen. A character named Doodle who could exist on paper when existing anywhere else felt like too much to ask.
The violence she survived in those years, including a severe enough beating to require hospitalization, was processed not through the support systems she deserved but through drawing. Doodle became the place where everything went: the confusion and the anger and the grief and, eventually, the humor, because humor was one of the few things that made any of it bearable.
She transitioned in 2000. Her mother, Beverly Jo Henry, became the person she most admires in the world, a woman who, Hope says, was "woke" decades before the rest of the country woke up. Her sister Cynthia became a steadfast ally. And Doodle, the character who had absorbed the hardest years, began to change. The pain that made her give way, slowly, to the joy that followed. Doodle got lighter. Funnier. More outward-facing.
Going Public
About four years ago, Hope began sharing Doodle with her LGBTQ+ community in Las Vegas. She wasn't sure what to expect. What she found was that the character who had saved her in private turned out to be saving other people, too. Seeing someone reflect your experience back to you with honesty and humor and zero apology is, for people who have spent their lives having their experiences minimized, something close to medicine.
The response to Doodle in community spaces made one thing clear: this couldn't stay private. And the escalating political hostility toward trans people made another thing clear: the timing for going fully public was not something to wait out. It was something to step into.
Trans in the Time of Trump is the result. A debut book. The first of nine. An artist who spent five decades quietly preparing for a fight she knew was coming, and who is now, pen in hand, fully in it.
What Comes Next
The Doodle series is planned across nine books, each one building on the political and personal territory mapped in Trans in the Time of Trump. Hope has described the series as a declaration of resistance, a sustained commitment to using art rooted in genuine lived experience to speak truth in a climate that would prefer trans voices to go quiet.
They won't. Doodle won't. And Hope Abbigail Nulf, who has been drawing since 1977 and who knows better than most what it takes to keep going when everything around you is telling you to stop, is just getting started.