“Reid Rasner, an openly gay Republican running for Wyoming’s sole House seat, is spending the final stretch of the campaign on a project he didn’t expect: suing members of his own party for defamation,” Semafor reports.

“On Friday morning, Rasner will settle one case against an Iowa man who called him a ‘pedophile’ under several of his campaign’s Facebook posts. Rasner is pursuing another case against a former GOP Wyoming state senator who he alleges led a whisper campaign accusing him of sexual misconduct.”

Washington Post: “The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that states may ban trans athletes from girls and women’s teams, affirming policies in 27 states. But it said nothing about the Democratic states that allow transgender students to compete.”

“Now the Trump administration and conservative advocacy groups are pressing forward in pursuit of a coast-to-coast ban as the fight shifts to another set of court cases. The Alliance Defending Freedom, which won Tuesday’s case, is backing three pending cases, while three cases filed by the Justice Department are also making their way through lower courts.”

New York Times: “Support for gay marriage is now declining, reversing a yearslong trend. Earlier this month, Gallup released a poll showing that Republican support for gay marriage now stood at 37 percent, a decline of 18 percentage points from a high in 2022. Support among independents declined, too.”

“And a few Republican lawmakers are also pushing resolutions against gay marriage. Since 2025, bills and resolutions had been introduced in about a dozen states, either urging the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell or proposing marriage categories limited to heterosexual couples, according to Lambda Legal, a gay rights group. Nearly all died in committee.”

Washington Post: “Ahead of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the International Olympic Committee on Thursday banned transgender women from competing in women’s events — a move that was immediately applauded by the White House.”

“A large Pride flag was quietly removed from the Stonewall National Monument in Manhattan after a directive from the federal government, the latest step in the Trump administration’s nationwide assault on diversity initiatives and the second time in less than a year it has targeted the Greenwich Village site, which commemorates the birth of the LGBTQ rights movement,” the New York Times reports.

“Republican gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears and her conservative allies have gone all in on anti-trans messaging in the Virginia governor’s race, launching more frequent attacks — and taking those attacks further — than Donald Trump’s campaign did in 2024,” NOTUS reports.

“It won’t be a one-off escalation.”

“Earle-Sears’ increased focus on transgender issues is a preview of the Republican Party’s message in the 2026 midterm election, according to political strategists in both parties. They describe the Virginia contest as a model for Republicans in key congressional and statewide races, with candidates prioritizing transgender issues more than they did in 2024, even at the expense of longtime conservative causes like crime, immigration and even the economy.”

“The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to let it limit passport sex markers for transgender and nonbinary individuals, its latest effort to get the justices to intervene in a fight over restrictive policies targeting LGBTQ+ Americans,” CNN reports.

“I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching, because according to our president there’s only two genders… and I don’t want to promote something that is against our president’s laws as well as against my religious beliefs.”

— A Texas A&M student, quoted by KBTX, objecting to LGBTQ content in a university course in a viral video that led to the removals of a dean and department head and the firing of a professor.

Virginia gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears (R) expressed strong opposition to a series of LGBTQ+ rights in a candidate questionnaire completed when she unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2004, the Virginia Mercury reports.

She responded “yes” to questions about whether she would vote to block same-sex couples from adopting children and oppose workplace protections for gay people, and she indicated that she believed homosexuality is an “immoral lifestyle choice.”

New York Times: “The dilemma is reflective of the Democratic Party’s broader struggles with identity politics as it dissects its losses in 2024. Recovering its standing with voters, many in the party believe, requires coming to terms with the party’s transformation during the Obama and first Trump presidencies, when American liberals broadly embraced what had previously been vanguard positions on a range of social and cultural issues, including gender and race, immigration and policing.”

“The Trump administration on Wednesday sued California’s Education Department and the entity that oversees the state’s high school sports, accusing them of violating federal laws against sex-based discrimination by allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports,” the New York Times reports.