Anti-Allyship and the Indirect Subordination of Queer People

Authors

• Richard Luedeman

Abstract

This Article theorizes and interrogates anti-allyship as a central mechanism of modern subordination of queer people. While not new, anti-allyship is expanding rapidly under the second Trump administration. Defined as the deliberate imposition of legal, financial, and reputational costs on those who support queer individuals or institutions, anti-allyship is a strategy of indirect oppression. It targets not queer people directly, but the infrastructure of support on which queer communities rely: clinicians, educators, family members, researchers, and organizations. In doing so, it often evades the formal protections of civil rights law, which remain tethered to anticlassification models and status-based protections that demand direct injury to members of protected classes. By punishing those who express solidarity across identity lines, anti-allyship exploits doctrinal asymmetries to undermine queer equality while avoiding legal redress.

Anti-allyship manifests across a range of legal and institutional contexts. State and federal governments have issued legal threats—both real and performative—against doctors, teachers, and administrators who support queer youth, chilling allyship through intimidation. Public agencies have defunded or dismantled queer-inclusive programs, redirecting resources away from affirming institutions under the guise of fiscal neutrality. In the workplace, allies face adverse employment actions, yet legal theories of retaliation and associational discrimination offer only patchwork and precarious protections. Increasingly, accommodation-seeking—usually grounded in conservative religious claims—is weaponized to force institutions to retract public and private acts of allyship. Each tactic is facilitated by features of existing law, including the state action doctrine, the narrow conception of animus, the limited protection of association, and the extraordinary solicitude shown to anti-queer religious objections.

This Article not only names anti-allyship but positions it as an engine of anti-queer legal and political strategy in the current era. It argues that existing legal frameworks are poorly equipped to recognize indirect subordination, especially when harms are diffuse. It calls for a doctrinal shift—across equal protection, employment law, and First Amendment jurisprudence—to recognize that suppressing queer allyship is itself a form of discrimination. In particular, the Article offers a suite of legal reforms at both the state and federal levels: expanding standing to encompass both allies and indirectly harmed queer individuals; clarifying courts’ power to stop animus-driven government actions regardless of the immediate target; recognizing allyship as protected expressive conduct; and reforming accommodation law to consider third-party harms and systemic effects.

First Page

473

Recommended Citation

Richard Luedeman, Anti-Allyship and the Indirect Subordination of Queer People, 101 Wash. L. Rev. 473 (2026).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wlr/vol101/iss2/5