The enthusiasm of gender-ideology activists for their cause cannot be doubted, but their regard for the truth can. That’s the lesson to be drawn from a Philadelphia-area law firm’s investigation into accusations that the Central Bucks School District’s conservative school board fosters unchecked harassment of transgender students.

The investigation by Duane Morris LLP, which consisted of 45 interviews and more than 120,000 documents, focused heavily on Anthony Burgess, a former Lenape Middle School teacher suspended in May 2022. Burgess, a confidante of students experiencing gender dysphoria, and his defenders claimed that the conservatives running the school district punished him merely for advising a student to file a civil rights complaint over rampant bullying. Those claims prompted a national controversy, as media held up the district as an example of conservative aggression against trans rights. As Duane Morris’s report makes clear, however, the narrative was built on fabrications.

Michael Rinaldi, a lawyer with the firm, explained in a presentation at a packed April school board meeting last month that Burgess had used his position to hide bullying allegations, thus manufacturing the appearance of apathy by administrators. “The evidence and circumstances suggest that Mr. Burgess believed that if he brought to light supposed widespread unaddressed bullying and harassment of LGBTQ students and convinced a federal agency to investigate such matters, the school board would cave to the inevitable criticism and bad press,” Rinaldi said.

Documents obtained from Burgess’s school computer show that he created a dossier detailing incidents of harassment that children brought to him, many of which he kept under wraps despite administrators’ attempts to help. For example, a week after the dossier was completed, on March 10, 2022, Lenape principal Geanine Saullo emailed several teachers and staff, including Burgess, about one student in the dossier, referred to in the report as “Student 1.”