Transgender Navy SEAL Tells Her Story In New Book

Transgender Navy SEAL Kristin Beck has published a memoir, Warrior Princess: A U.S. Navy SEAL’s Journey to Coming out Transgender, with co-author Anne Speckhard. Beck has come forward to promote her story, now available on Amazon Kindle, and it sounds like a fascinating book indeed.

Here’s the introduction from Amazon:

“Chris Beck played high school football. He bought a motorcycle, much to his mother’s dismay, at age 17. He grew up to become a U.S. Navy SEAL, serving our country for twenty years on thirteen deployments, including seven combat deployments, and ultimately earned a Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. To everyone who saw him, he was a hero. A warrior. A man.

But underneath his burly beard, Chris had a secret…He was transgender, and the woman inside needed to get out.”

But Chris Beck had to keep the secret for 20 years, because transgender people are still not allowed to openly serve in the US military. In the course of her career, Beck was deployed 13 times, including seven deployments to war zones, including a tour in the elite SEAL Team Six. She earned both a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

But the transgender Navy SEAL wasn’t free to pursue her life in the open until her retirement in 2011. Now she is making peace with her identity — and she hopes that her example will help young people do the same.

She’s also the founder of Healing Grounds, a non-profit organization that supports returning service personnel in peacetime by helping them create gardens. Beck explained the purpose of the healing gardens this way:

“I am a combat wounded disabled veteran living in St Petersburg [Florida]; my house had a desolate back yard. A friend who previously ran a nursery helped me landscape part of my backyard and later build a small fishpond. The work brought me great peace…I no longer feel anger, resentment or depression; I feel peace. I want to give this option of a ‘peace garden’ to my veteran brothers and sisters.”

The organization provides training in the necessary landscaping skills as well as the actual nursery plants and other items needed to create the gardens.

With her dedication to a search for inner peace for transgendered young people and veterans of all kinds, transgender Navy SEAL Kristin Beck has a genuine message as well as a fascinating story.

@withoutmywings_ I am writing a book….. I was a Navy SEAL for 20 years; now working toward my own peace as a woman. ?

— Kristin Beck (@healinggrounds) March 13, 2013

[book cover courtesy Kristin Beck via Amazon]

[top photo of unnamed Navy SEAL in Afghanistan by U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Tim Turner via US Navy and Wikimedia Commons]