Nestled in the heart of Coke Lawn, a sprawling Dallas suburb that calls itself a “gayborhood for straight allies,” Julie Wokeman’s sunny apartment feels like a queer haven. The well-worn spines of futanari hentai pack its wall-to-wall bookshelves next to pothos vines spilling out of macrame planters to frame femboy Hooters posters. Hanging from the living room window is a pride flag that flutters in the pleasant spring breeze. But outside the unconditional acceptance of the Pinterest-white walls lurks a grave and growing danger, quietly imperiling the lives of underserved allies like Julie.
“It’s really tough being ABCD+ right now, you know?” Julie said to me after a few minutes of small talk, referring to the Ally, Bicurious, Chaser and Dance Major community Coke Lawn was created to serve. Her expression was pleasant as she gestured for me to take the mayonnaise-and-oatmeal sandwiches plated neatly on her coffee table, but the tension in her shoulders betrayed the silent hardships common to so many of America’s othered. “With the new administration cracking down on transgender rights, I don’t even feel safe walking down the street anymore. Someone out there could see me eating an acai bowl or shopping at Whole Foods and deduce that I’m an ally, you know, and who knows what they’ll do to me then?”
As President Trump and his galvanized Republican party make sweeping strides in gutting transgender healthcare, bathroom rights, access to sports, legal sex marker changes, and more, Julie finds the implications for her community are severe.
“Everyone in Coke Lawn is afraid for their job security, their families, pretty much the trajectory of the rest of their lives,” she told me. “I’ve had to stop inviting my trans friends to hang out — it’s almost impossible to date, even within the ally community, if everyone knows you’re associating with people that bring so much trouble, you know?”
The last time Julie went out in public with a transgender friend, she recounted with a troubled sigh, was over two months ago and it ended in disaster. Her voice shook as she recounted the traumatic incident.
“We went out to Sunday brunch together, which I knew was a brave and difficult decision for me, but I believe in doing what’s right,” she said. “We tried this new breakfast place a little deeper into downtown, but as soon as we entered, someone started shouting, ‘I’ll kill you, fucking @!$&#’ and ‘Pull down his skirt’ and everyone in there was staring at us — I was terrified someone would recognize me and start gossiping that I was seen in public with a @!$&#, or, god forbid, that I’m in a lesbian relationship with her.” Dabbing her eyes with a napkin, Julie continued in a near-strangled voice. “I’ll never get a match on Hinge again. And I didn’t even get to try the avocado toast.”
According to Julie, ABCD+ community members in her neighborhood have started developing mutual aid and support networks to protect each other from anti-trans laws. One of the tenets of their safety-first methodology, she said, is strategic cooperation with law enforcement.
“Look, I don’t like cops any more than the next gal. I could really do without the parking tickets or worrying about weed smell in my car leather,” she commented. “But to keep the community safe, you gotta make some sacrifices, even if it means appeasing the enemy a little. If a cop storms into a public bathroom around these parts and flashes their badge, it’s obvious what they’re looking for, you know? To make sure they don’t haul off one of our own, it’s important to just point out the trans person they’re searching for. Kropotkin called it ‘harm reduction,’ I think.”
But this strategy hasn’t come without its own challenges. Staring wistfully out her window, Julie lamented numerous occasions when she was left all alone in a public restroom after turning in the only other person there to roving police packs for being transgender, ending up with no one to ask if her eyeliner was crooked.
“You know how shitty bathroom lighting is,” Julie sniffled. “And I’m supposed to just walk out of there without someone verifying my wings are indeed twins and not, like, deformed second cousins? I can’t remember the last time I felt so antagonized in a women’s safe space.”
The conversation took a turn toward safe spaces — for Julie and other ABCD+ individuals, a vital yet regularly inaccessible avenue to express oneself freely and without fear of ostracization. As she poured piping hot Earl Grey into “Yuri!!! On Ice” mugs for the two of us, she explained the history of Coke Lawn as a safe space project. Founded by four billionaires down on their luck after finding no one like themselves — interested in golf and fiscal conservatism as well as Lady Gaga — at the queer bars and nightclubs peppering Dallas proper, the exurban residential development aimed to define a space where ABCD+ individuals, families, and culture could prosper free of queer overshadowing.
“We support queer people, of course, but acting like our community doesn’t have its own needs, thought leaders, and political struggles basically denies the entire theory of intersectionality,” Julie said. “Being minoritized in that queer-heavy area made us feel invisible — I’m sure every ally’s gotten a weird look for saying they have an opposite-sex partner, for instance. And we wanted to get out of their ghetto anyway, you know? I mean, why can’t we have vegan restaurants and ‘Emilia Perez’ screenings and swinger parties in a nice suburban setting instead of that nasty old downtown where all the queers seem to congregate?”
Despite the differences between the two communities, though, Julie said they share a long history of facing the same oppression at the hands of lawmakers and everyday citizens alike.
“It doesn’t matter whether you actually violated the law or not — just looking like you vote blue or know what a portobello slider tastes like puts you on the exact same hit list,” she noted. “Just take prisons. One of my trans female friends got arrested for performing in a drag show and when I went to see her during visitation hours, I had to be around all these male inmates that were twice my size. Just sitting there at the other visitation tables. It was terrifying. They kept calling her all these names and telling her to sleep with one eye open and all I could think was, oh my god, does my dress make my shoulders look wide? Do they think I’m trans too? Is someone gonna say something to me?”
Before the wall-mounted cuckoo clock sang out the strike of the hour, signaling my time to depart, Julie removed the pride flag from her window, saying the increased foot traffic outside her apartment complex each afternoon makes her worry about gaining a reputation as “too outspoken” on controversial queer issues. After carefully rolling up the pennant to re-hang tomorrow morning, she took me to a bookshelf to show me a large, leather-bound photo album, filled with photos of Julie and her ex-boyfriend.
“I had to break up with him when he got arrested last year,” she told me somberly, caressing each page with a lovesick touch. “He drove his truck through a Trans Day of Visibility march downtown and killed a bunch of trans protesters, and that whole experience was incredibly difficult for me. No one offered me support even though I was hurting so much in the aftermath. They kept saying I shouldn’t have been dating him because he was notorious for posting transphobic slurs on X (the everything app!), voting for Trump and regularly petitioning the city council to ban trans women from breathing, but I didn’t think he actually meant any of that, you know? I thought he was doing all that stuff to keep the real transphobes off our trail so they wouldn’t harm us for our allyship. It’s so hard to know what to do in situations like that, and I just wish queer people would understand and support their marginalized ally siblings better during those difficult moments.”
Before I left, Julie gave me a zine produced by an anarchist collective local to Coke Lawn detailing the best ways for women to avoid getting mistaken as gender ideologists. Suggestions included dressing more girlishly, taking up classically feminine professions like schoolteaching or nursing, becoming pregnant and carrying a photo of one’s karyotype at all times — all of which Julie said she’s done over the past few months. Another pamphlet in her collection detailed proposed state and local anti-trans laws and how they might affect upcoming ABCD+ events, like next week’s “In Photos: Girls Kissing Heterosexually at Frat Parties” community art exhibition.
“I just wish more people paid attention to how these anti-trans laws are actually hurting people,” Julie said. “No one’s talking about how a whole generation of allies is going to grow up without ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race,’ or how dangerous it’ll become to hunt down sissy hypno porn unless you use a VPN. And it’s exactly these real-world impacts on everyday Americans, you know, people just like you or your family or your colleagues, that the current administration is trying to pretend don’t exist.”
