We knew Wednesday’s sudden Twitter announcement by President Trump, regarding transgender service in the military was certainly going to be a hot topic.

It took the focus off of his horrible, public lynching of Jeff Sessions’ career, at least.

While our Kira Davis presented the views of one combat-tested wounded warrior, giving his views on why turning our military into labs of social justice acquiescence is just a really, really horrible idea, there’s always another side.

Christopher T. Beck is a retired Navy SEAL Team 6 member.

He’s also going by the name “Kristen” now, playing dress-up, and proudly proclaiming his status as a transgendered service member.

And he absolutely has a problem with Trump’s tweets about transgendered service members.

“Let’s meet face to face and you tell me I’m not worthy,” Kristin Beck, a 20-year Navy veteran and the first openly transgender former SEAL, told Business Insider on Wednesday. “Transgender doesn’t matter. Do your service.”

Beck actually has a lot to be proud of.

He served 20 years BEFORE his “transition,” taking part in 13 deployments, to places like Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Seven of those were combat deployments.

His awards include the Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and the Defense Meritorious Service medal.

Beck retired in 2011 and started playing dress-up. In 2013, safely away from his duties to his nation, he began taking hormones, as a part of his mental and emotional illness.

Beck wants people to accept that transgendered individuals, even though their condition, gender dysphoria, is a diagnosed mental illness, belong in the trenches. Every other service member should trust that they are emotionally capable of handling the rigors of combat.

Indeed, Christopher T. Beck, based on what we know of his service, did his job.

“A very professional unit with great leadership wouldn’t have a problem,” she said. “I can have a Muslim serving right beside Jerry Falwell, and we’re not going to have a problem. It’s a leadership issue, not a transgender issue.”

So if somebody wrestling with a diagnosed mental illness flips, it’s not that they’re mentally unstable. It’s the failure of leadership to perceive, plan, and overcome those issues?

I guess those with Schizophrenia, Schizoaffective disorders, or Panic disorder should be allowed to serve, as well, with the burden to keep them focused left to their commanding officers.

But for all of Beck’s bravado, his case needs to be seen as an anomaly, rather than the norm.

He got lucky.

And if you go by his own words, so did every man serving in his unit beside him.

While Beck was abandoning his role as a father (He has two children) and “transitioning” to his “Kristen” persona, he met with Anne Speckhard, a psychologist from Georgetown University School of Medicine, who was doing a study on the resilience and coping mechanisms of U.S. Navy SEALs.

After meeting in a gay bar, with Beck dressed like a woman, Speckhard agreed to help write a book, called Warrior Princess.

How cute.

One line from the book signals just how thin the ice was for other service members fighting beside Beck in those 7 combat missions.

In the book, Speckhard notes that Beck had a desire to die honorably “so that [she] wouldn’t have to wrestle anymore with the emotional pain that stemmed from the lack of congruency between [her] gender identity and body”.^[11]

The emphasis there is mine.

He wanted to die “honorably,” hence his military service.

The thing about dying in combat, if that’s your wish, sometimes you put those with you at risk.

As it is, Trump’s mad tweeting, no matter how much I actually agreed with the sentiment, was done in haste, and with no policy in place to make it anything more than something he pulled out of the haze that surrounds his thought process.

We should thank Christopher Beck for his 20 years of service, but his activism after he’s out of the line of fire is self-serving, reckless, and puts the integrity, as well as the safety of active service members at risk.

And I would absolutely tell him that to his face.