'Craziness broke loose': Arizona teacher on leave after James O'Keefe attack

Last week, Marana High School physics teacher Les Beard learned about a chromosomal disorder with relevance to current events and decided to share what he’d learned with his students.

This week, followers of right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe are calling for Beard to be fired for defying an executive order from President Donald Trump in which he declared that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.”

Beard is a former geophysicist who has taught physics at Marana High for six years.

It started when Beard was doing some nighttime scrolling on his phone and came across a news clip about a woman with androgen insensitivity syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, and decided to share what he’d learned with his students.

Those with the syndrome have the XY chromosomes of a male but their bodies don’t react to the hormones that cause development of male sex characteristics. Many of those with the syndrome outwardly appear to be female, but have internal sex organs of a male, according to the National Library of Medicine. Some have characteristics of both sexes.

“It piqued my interest, so I thought I would mention it,” Beard told the Arizona Mirror during a Jan. 31 phone interview.

Beard told his students that those with the syndrome are often raised as girls and don’t find out that their chromosomes are XY until they go to the doctor to find out why their menstrual cycle never started. Many of them balk when told that they’re actually male, Beard said.

“None of them really believe it, because they’ve been women all their lives,” he told the students last week.

Beard showed the class clothed photos of some of the women with the syndrome, which he said “looked every bit like a woman” and asked the class, “Are these guys? Mr. Trump says so.”

The lesson caused a “ruckus” in the classroom, which Beard — who speaks in a slow Texas drawl — said he expected, with some kids loudly disagreeing or shaking their heads while others seemed to agree with his point.

“I wanted the kids to understand that, if we make rules, they should encompass all situations that might appear,” Beard said. “It was all too easy to find an outlier that doesn’t seem to fit the two gender idea.”

The following week at school began uneventfully for Beard, but on Jan. 28, he learned that one of his students had recorded the discussion and shared it with her mother, who had then sent it to O’Keefe.

O’Keefe posted the video on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, where he has 3 million followers.

In the post, O’Keefe accused Beard of “misleading students by contradicting the NIH and referring to people affected by AIS as ‘women.’”

“Then all sorts of craziness broke loose,” Beard said.

Commenters on social media called Beard a “groomer,” a label that generally means a person who preys on children to condition them for sexual abuse but which has become a catch-all term for conservatives to refer to adults who are accepting of trans students and members of the LGBTQ community. Some of them said that Beard’s lesson on biology was proof of their claims that public school teachers were indoctrinating students with their “woke agenda.”

Others called for him to be arrested and charged with sexual harassment or endangering the welfare of a child. O’Keefe himself repeatedly called a Marana Unified School District spokeswoman to ask if Beard would be punished for defying Trump’s executive order.

O’Keefe’s followers sent Beard nasty emails and contacted the district, calling for him to be fired for sharing “gender ideology” with students.

The video about Beard’s lesson, which O’Keefe posted on X Jan. 28, garnered 600,000 views, 10,000 likes and 332 comments over the next three days.

On Tuesday, Beard was called into a meeting with an administrator to talk about the off-topic lesson and the district’s expectation that teachers stick to their curriculum and avoid sharing personal and political opinions. The next day, he was told to work from home and ordered not to have contact with any Marana teachers or students.

Next week, he expects to find out if he still has a job.

Beard said that he had not previously received any criticism from administrators for the content of his lessons.

Allison Benjamin, a spokesperson for the district, told the Mirror via email that she couldn’t answer specific questions surrounding Beard’s suspension or school policies, but instead supplied a statement similar to one she previously provided to O’Keefe.

In the statement, Benjamin shared two “policies that address expectations for classroom instruction that include: 1. Teaching to the state standards that are focused on course content. 2. Providing a learning environment where teachers remain neutral and refrain from sharing their personal beliefs and opinions.”

“The administration will continue to follow appropriate guidelines detailed in district policy to ensure all staff fulfill these expectations,” she wrote.

O’Keefe’s video features an at-times combative phone call between him and Benjamin. In it, O’Keefe tells her that trying to get comments from the district is a “kafkaesque nightmare.” Benjamin later agrees with O’Keefe that this was “an extraordinary situation and I’m glad that you’re reporting on it.”

Who is James O’Keefe?

O’Keefe, who already had a penchant for publishing highly-edited and misleading undercover recordings, founded Project Veritas in 2010.

Project Veritas became a mainstay of the conservative media ecosystem for sending its “undercover journalists” — some of whom were trained by a former spy on how to covertly infiltrate their targets — to secretly record liberals and journalists in an effort to catch them saying something embarrassing.

One of the so-called reporters set up a date with a top Twitter employee and secretly recorded him venting about Elon Musk. Another made a secret recording of Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs’ twin sister, Becky Hobbs. In the video, apparently recorded during dinner at a restaurant, the governor’s twin said the Democratic Party had been donating to MAGA Republicans in Arizona primary elections to give Democratic candidates a better chance of winning in the general election.

The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics says journalists should only opt to work undercover in rare circumstances, when there’s no other way to obtain the information.

O’Keefe was pushed out as the chairman of Project Veritas in 2023 following accusations that he mistreated staff by yelling at them and making them do his personal errands and mismanaged finances, the Associated Press reported.

O’Keefe has continued publishing sting-style videos since his ouster from Project Veritas. He even recruited volunteers to make undercover recordings of election worker training in Maricopa County ahead of the November election. He later claimed that trainers’ accurate description of the state’s election laws brought up “serious questions about the integrity of the voting process.”

The recording of Beard was submitted anonymously to O’Keefe’s recently launched Citizen Journalism Foundation, according to the article on O’Keefe’s website.

Numerous commenters who reacted to the video said that they thought Beard belonged in jail for his disregard of Trump’s executive order.

In reality, the White House doesn’t have any legal authority to control local school district curricula. But Beard said that his administrators are worried about losing federal funding.

He admitted that he veered from physics and into a politically charged subject, which his supervisors did not appreciate.

“I didn’t intend to bring politics too sharply into the discussion, but it got there,” Beard said.

Beard, 69, moved to the Tucson area 12 years ago with his wife and two children. His daughter has since graduated from the University of Arizona and his son, who often features his father in his own goofy YouTube videos, is a freshman at Marana High. Beard said that he enjoys teaching the students at Marana High, and he hopes to hold onto his job, even after administrators suggested that he voluntarily resign.

“I think it would make things very easy for them if I resigned,” Beard said, adding that his administrators are not “nasty people” and that he understands the difficult position that they’re in.

College professors have some First Amendment protections when it comes to academic expression in the classroom, but court decisions over the last 20 years have not given the same protections to K-12 teachers.

Beard said he believes teaching opportunities are lost when instructors are strictly limited in topics of discussion, causing students to wonder why teachers steer clear of interesting, socially relevant subjects.

“To be able to freely express yourself will lead to a richer conversation among people who may have very different opinions,” Beard said.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.