A months-long standoff between between President Donald Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) continued to escalate this week with a lawsuit targeting the administration on Monday and cuts to federal grants to the state on Tuesday.

The conflict kicked off on Feb. 21 at the White House, where the president threatened Mills with retaliation after she declined to say that her state would not comply with his executive order barring transgender athletes from competing in school sports. The governor and other officials have said the policy is in conflict with provisions of the Maine Human Rights Act, while the president argued his executive action supersedes state law.

While the heated exchange between the two concluded with each party vowing to see the other in court, developments in the time since suggest that Trump and Mills are likely to square off over legal questions far broader than whether the White House can prohibit trans girls in a blue state from joining the field hockey team.

In a complaint filed on Monday, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey argued U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had unlawfully frozen funding for “certain administrative and technological functions” in schools in his state after concluding, in the absence of a formal investigation, that some of their programs violated Title IX rules. A letter last week from Rollins notifying Mills of the USDA’s decision warned that it was “only the beginning.”

Then on Tuesday, the Maine Department of Corrections said the Justice Department had cancelled several grants, which according to the Maine Morning Star would have supported “drug treatment for adults in reentry, programs that foster engagement between incarcerated parents and their children, and resources for corrections agencies to improve post-release supervision in order to prevent recidivism and reduce crime.” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said during an interview that the move came in response to the state’s incarceration of a transwoman in a women’s prison.

One of Trump’s day-one executive actions targeting trans rights included a provision directing the AG and the Homeland Security secretary to ensure that women’s prisons and detention centers do not detain or house “males” or trans women, though here and elsewhere the administration deliberately does not make the distinction — and in Section 2 of the order, establishes that the policy of the federal government will be to treat gender as a binary that is fixed at birth, a narrow definition that denies the biological reality that people can be intersex (meaning their sex characteristics cannot be clearly distinguished as male or female) while others, like trans individuals, may experience incongruity between their gender and birth sex.

Leading up to this week, other major developments following the Feb. 21 White House confrontation between Trump and Maine’s Democratic governor include:

• A probe in late March by the U.S. Department of Education into whether policies in Maine schools that protect the privacy of students by prohibiting disclosures to parents about the sexual orientation or gender identity of their kids may violate federal law,
• Trump’s demand for an apology from Mills on her refusal to do so, both in late March,
• DOE’s determination in late March that schools in the state were violating Title IX by allowing trans women and girls to compete in sports, which came after the Trump administration reversed that portion of the Title IX guidance issued under former President Joe Biden,
• An announcement in mid-March by the the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights that the Maine Principals’ Association and Greely High School violated Title IX by allowing trans athletes to compete in sports,
• The USDA’s decision in early March to hold up funding for universities in the University of Maine system pending the conclusion of the agency’s probe into possible violations of Title IX and Title VI, which was subsequently reinstated after a couple of weeks,
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s withdrawal of funding in early March for the University of Maine’s Maine Sea Grant program, which was followed less than a week later with the U.S. Department of Commerce ‘s announcement that it would be renegotiated, and
• HHS’s determination in late February that the Maine Department of Education violated Title IX, a conclusion reached just four days after an investigation was opened and without any interviews, data requests or negotiations.

The U.S. Air Force has issued a “directive to cease the use of ‘preferred pronouns’ (he/him, she/her, or they/them) to identify one’s gender identity in professional communications,” according to a report published in the Hill on Wednesday.

The rule, which applies to both airmen and civilian employees, was first adopted on Feb. 4 pursuant to President Donald Trump’s anti-transgender executive order called, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

Days after the administration’s issuance of that order on the first day of the president’s second term, the Office of Personnel Management instructed agencies across the whole of the federal government to remove pronouns from email signatures and enforce the policy barring employees from using them.

Additionally, on Jan. 27 Trump published an order barring trans people from joining the U.S. Armed Forces, indicating that those who are currently in serving would be separated from the military. The Pentagon is fending off legal challenges to the ban in federal courts.

Particularly given the extent of the new administration’s efforts to restrict the rights of trans Americans and push them out of public life, the Air Force’s reversal of the pronoun guidance was surprising.

According to reporting in Military.com, the move might have come because officials concluded the rule was in conflict with language in the military appropriations funding legislation passed by Congress in 2023.

The NDAA established that the defense secretary “may not require or prohibit a member of the armed forces or a civilian employee of the Department of Defense to identify the gender or personal pronouns of such member or employee in any official correspondence of the Department.”

American far-right evangelical organizations fund African MPs and religious groups and support their advocacy efforts against homosexuality.

The support for the two influential groups on the continent has contributed to increased homophobic rhetoric for conservative family values through religious teachings and public policy. Open for Business, a coalition of leading global organizations that champion LGBTQ inclusion, revealed this trend in its latest report that surveyed the East African countries of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda.

“The anti-LGBTQ+ agenda driven by Christian groups in Kenya and Uganda has received significant funding and support from foreign anti-rights groups, particularly from U.S. far-right evangelical organizations,” the report states.

The two nations, along with Tanzania, have had heightened curtailing of queer rights in recent years through legislation and religious protests. Homosexuality remains criminalized in the three countries, with varied jail terms of not less than 10 years.

“There is much misinformation and disinformation being circulated in Kenya about LGBTQ+ issues — churches are behind much of this, and they leverage selective interpretations of religious teachings to stir up anti-rights sentiments,” the report reads.  

It adds religious groups have attained greater influence with their homophobic campaigns under President William Ruto, who is Kenya’s first evangelical Christian head of state.

The American far-right evangelical churches are part of the New York-based World Evangelical Alliance, whose global believers are considered “incredibly diverse and vibrant people of faith.”

“They are bound together by spiritual convictions that they consider ‘non-negotiable’ while acknowledging a wide variety of expressions in non-essential matters such as their style of worship,” the Rev. Leon Morris, the founder member and former chairman of Evangelical Alliance of Victoria, states on WEA’s website.  

The religious groups under the Kenya Christian Forum, in partnership with Linda Uhai Consortium (or Protect Life in Swahili) composed of pro-life organizations, late last month held their annual march in Nairobi, the country’s capital. Opposition to LGBTQ rights was among the agenda items.

Some anti-homosexuality placards that march participants held read, “Homosexuality is abnormal,” “Rainbow belongs to God,” “No to Western cultural imperialism, yes to family values,” and “In the beginning God made them; male and female.” The organizers also criticized the Kenyan courts over their recent rulings in favor of the queer community, such as allowing the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission to register as a non-governmental organization.

The African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty is a caucus of African MPs that American far-right evangelical organizations support to drive anti-LGBTQ policies in their countries.  

The group held its second conference in Entebbe, Uganda, last May. The definition of sex and sexuality and their impact on LGBTQ issues were among the topics that delegates from more than 20 countries discussed.

The three-day conference that Ugandan Parliament Speaker Anitah Among and Henk Jan Van Scothorst, director of the Christian Council International, sought to curb homosexuality. The delegates also resolved to have the African Caribbean Pacific and European Union Economic Partnership, also known as the Samoa agreement, reviewed for undermining the sovereignty of African governments over LGBTQ rights and related “human rights” issues.

The far-left government officials and queer lobby groups from the U.K. and other Western countries, meanwhile, are engaging with LGBTQ activists in Africa to counter American evangelical organizations’ anti-homosexuality campaigns.

British officials, led by Equalities Minister Nia Griffith, in February met with Sexual Minorities Uganda Executive Director Frank Mugisha and Erick Mundia, a senior policy advisor for Ipas Africa Alliance, a Kenya-based abortion rights advocacy group.

“As part of our Queering Atrocity Prevention program, which seeks to center LGBTQI+ rights and risks as part of atrocity prevention and wider peace and security, our team held a parliamentary roundtable exploring the implications of transnational far-right organizing for global LGBTQI+ rights and how the UK parliament can respond,” the statement reads.  

Klara Wertheim, head of global programs at Stonewall, and Farida Mostafa, queering atrocity prevention manager of Protection Approaches, were among the other representatives of queer rights organizations who participated in the roundtable with highlighted “the implications of transitional far-right activity for global LGBTQI+ rights.”

“Discussions with MPs, Lords, parliamentary staff and civil society representatives centered on tactics used by far-right actors to disrupt democratic rights-based systems,” reads the statement. “The impacts of these malign efforts on sexual and gender-based rights in the UK and abroad, and how parliamentary actors can contribute to stemming these trends in their parliamentary work.”