Just over a week ago, the NY Times published a lengthy story looking back at the Loudoun County schools story, i.e. the one involving the sexual abuse of two girls in two different schools and the angry parent whose daughter was one of the victims.

Author Charles Homans manages to include a lot of factual information in the story and yet it’s clear from the outset that he has a specific goal, to undermine the conservative narrative about it. In fact, he makes clear later on there are two specific narratives he wants to undo. The first is that the sexual assault of a teenage girl in a bathroom had anything to do with trans identity.

You may remember that one reason this case became so well known is that the male student involved was wearing a skirt at the time of the assault. That triggered immediate concern from the school district that the incident could involve “policy 8040” a trans policy which was about to be implemented allowing students to use the bathrooms of their choice. But according to Homans, the male student in question wasn’t trans or even gender fluid. To back that up he turns to the mother of the male student who is given a chance to proclaim her own innocence/ignorance.

“He was always kind of doing his own thing,” the mother of the boy told me recently, picking at a muffin in a supermarket food court. “That’s always been the challenge with him.” She had done what she could, she said, had tried to work with his teachers. But what could she do when he was at school? “As parents,” she said, “we can’t fix it if we don’t know what’s going on.”

“He was always kind of doing his own thing,” would be a decent explanation for a student who had a weird hobby but it really falls short for describing a kid found responsible for two sexual assaults. But author Charles Homan isn’t interested in challenging that description or even suggesting it may say something about the mother’s level of involvement with an obviously troubled boy. His interest is in undermining the trans narrative and the mother is useful in that respect.

“He had presented to me this desire to explore a different lifestyle,” she said, which involved sometimes wearing women’s clothes. But he was “absolutely not” transgender, she said, and “he did not identify as fluid or anything like that.”

This makes very little sense. According to Harvard Health, gender fluidity can be defined as a “change over time in a person’s gender expression or gender identity, or both. That change might be in expression, but not identity, or in identity, but not expression. Or both expression and identity might change together.”

Gender expression would include things like a 14-year-old boy wearing a skirt to school and expressing a desire to explore a different lifestyle. So the mom is saying her son never explicitly identified as gender fluid and therefore didn’t fit in that category. But he did feel like experimenting with his gender expression which is another element of the basic definition of gender fluidity.

The school district was clearly and immediately concerned that the male student might in fact be gender fluid or trans. It was one of the first things the district’s operations officer relayed back to administrators by email on the day of the assault.

It was this fact that prompted Kevin Lewis, the district’s chief operations officer, to email several of the district’s top administrators that afternoon, announcing that he was convening a virtual meeting to discuss the situation.

“The incident at SBHS,” he wrote, “is related to policy 8040.”

Later in the story we learn that an investigation concluded that the school district administrators had done everything they could to hide the existence of that email and to refuse to give out any information about the meeting that followed that same day. They all forgot what was said.

Out of more than 100 pieces of evidence the special grand jury reviewed from the school district and the school board, the report presented only one suggesting that Policy 8040 might have factored into the handling of the case: the email from Kevin Lewis, the district’s chief operations officer, calling the virtual meeting on the afternoon of the first assault, in which he said the incident was related to the pending policy.

According to the report, both the school administration and the school board seemed to have done their best to conceal that email from the investigators. In their sworn testimony, administrators who attended the virtual meeting claimed to have forgotten anything of consequence that was said on the call. “We believe,” the report concluded bluntly, that “there was intentional institutional amnesia regarding this meeting.”

Ziegler and everyone else involved couldn’t remember anything that was said that day. But, miracle of miracles, when speaking to the NY Times Ziegler suddenly remembers all about the meeting that day and even specifically what was said.

Ziegler told me that when the administrators assembled for their virtual meeting on the afternoon of the assault, or in another conversation that day, he asked Tim Flynn, the Stone Bridge principal, whether the assailant was transgender.

“Look, the kid is not transgender,” Ziegler recalled Flynn saying. “He runs with the drama crowd, and you know how the drama crowd can be. They’re attention-seeking. And he’s been experimenting with different looks.” He wore skirts on occasion, “but he has never come out to the school as either nonbinary or transgender.”

I think the words that Ziegler attributes to Flynn, the principal, are my favorite part of this whole story. Again, there’s the obviously ridiculous statement that the boy in question liked to wear skirts occasionally but had never “come out” as nonbinary or trans. I guess it depends how you define coming out but verbal identification as trans is not the only basis for experimenting with gender fluidity. If a boy is wearing a skirt to school, i.e. in public, that’s what you would call a sign that he’s interested in gender fluid expression. But the best part is that Flynn reportedly put this all down to attention-seeking behavior by the “drama crowd.”

Well, yes, I’m sure that’s true. Really, I think it’s probably one of the most accurate things in this entire piece, whether Flynn actually said it or not. I’m equally certain that a significant percentage of the sudden rise in identification as trans and non-binary and gender fluid in high schools is also attention-seeking behavior by what could loosely be called the drama crowd. In fact, that’s sort of the whole conservative take on what’s going on with this issue right now. Many of these kids are just looking for positive attention from the peers and coming out as gender fluid is a guaranteed way to get it at this point in time. It’s a way to make your life seem much more dramatic and interesting than it really is.

So to sum up this first point, it’s pretty clear the administrators lied to investigators about what was discussed and only now we’re getting a version of the story which may or may not be true but which is certainly irrelevant. Whether or not the boy said he was trans, he was expressing gender fluidity in his choice of clothing which puts him trans adjacent by any reasonable accounting. Adjacent enough that it was a primary concern of administrators that day.

And that brings us to point two. When asked whether there had been any assaults in school bathrooms, Scott Ziegler and Beth Barts lied to parents, though they deny having that intent.

Ziegler told me that when Beth Barts asked her question about bathroom assaults at the June 22 school-board meeting, he understood it to refer to assaults by transgender students, which the board members had been discussing. “The answer to that was, and is to this day, no,” he told me — a point that he made directly later in the meeting.

But whatever his intentions might or might not have been, his answer was, on its face, false. And it was only a matter of time before someone noticed.

Ultimately, Charles Homans says how you look at this story will depend on what you believe is true. But it seems to me that you can make a pretty convincing case that Scott Ziegler is a progressive activist who lied at every turn and whose self-serving word for what happened and why probably can’t be trusted. But Homans doesn’t seem very interested in exploring that possibility even if it keeps inserting itself into his story.

In April, I went to the Loudoun County Courthouse for a preliminary hearing in the case. Ziegler sat in a middle row of the courtroom, wearing small hoop earrings and black nail polish — flourishes that would later draw an irate headline from The Daily Wire. “I wore a suit and tie for years,” he told me, but “it was never my style.” Now that he was retired, “I can do what I want,” he said. “And,” he added with a smile, “it pisses people off.”

Gee, a guy who revels in pissing off conservatives. I wonder how this story would look if you explored that angle a little more closely.