Retired Navy SEAL Chris Beck, who called himself Kristin Beck for nearly ten years, announced he is detransitioning, and warned Americans that LGBTQ activists pushing transgender health services on children are harming them.
In 2013, Beck, a combat veteran who served for over 20 years, with 13 deployments and numerous medals, came out as the first transgender soldier on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, a story that, podcast host Robby Starbuck noted earlier this month, was watched by “tens of millions of people.”
Beck’s announcement on CNN was followed by a book, Warrior Princess: A U.S. Navy SEAL’s Journey to Coming Out Transgender, co-authored by psychologist Anne Speckhard, Ph.D.
During his interview with Starbuck, Beck said he was “used” to popularize the idea of allowing transgender individuals in the military.
“I was used … I was very naive, I was in a really bad way and I got taken advantage of,” he told Starbuck. “I got propagandized. I got used badly by a lot of people who had knowledge way beyond me. They knew what they were doing. I didn’t.”
Beck shared how CNN’s “propaganda” to achieve its own mission of normalizing gender identity to overshadow biological sex, ultimately “destroyed” his life.
“Everything you see on CNN with my face, do not even believe a word of it,” Beck told Starbuck. “Everything that happened to me for the last ten years destroyed my life. I destroyed my life. I’m not a victim. I did this to myself, but I had help.”
Beck now says he takes “full responsibility” for his interview with CNN.
“I went on CNN and everything else, and that’s why I’m here right now,” he said. “I’m trying to correct that.”
Beck observed the devastating effects the spread of transgender ideology by LGBTQ activists and its medical industry is having on children, and urged Americans to “wake up”:
This is a billion-dollar industry between psychologists, between surgeries, between hormones, between chemicals, between follow-up treatments. There are thousands of gender clinics popping up all over our country. And each of those gender clinics is going to be pulling in probably over $50 million.”
“Does this seem right?” he asked. “This is why I am trying to tell America to wake up.”
Navy SEAL Chris Beck came out in 2013 as transgender. @andersoncooper did a special on @cnn about it. His story was used as propaganda to allow trans people in the military and to popularize the issue. Now Chris is ready to expose the truth. Watch here: https://t.co/ChbjE6Kgly pic.twitter.com/wQbGPln9K3
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) December 1, 2022
Beck, who is now in his 50s, said he now knows he had mental health issues growing up, concerns that, he said, are the real issues he, and children today, need to talk about.
“But what happened to me should not be an excuse for a psychologist to push their agenda,” he asserted.
The former Navy SEAL warned parents that children are in schools across America where “a lot of people are on board” with gender ideology, promoting the transgender lifestyle as holding out the promise of “a better life” with the elimination of the possibility of suicide if their new gender identity is “affirmed.”
In a recent study published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, Dr. Stephen B. Levine, of the Department of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, observed the high level of transgender ideology activism that has been allowed to influence medical issues pertaining to gender dysphoric youth.
Included in that activism is the fear-mongering in parents that urges them to be immediately “gender-affirming,” or else risk a child who commits suicide.
“The question of suicide is inappropriately handled,” Levine and his colleagues wrote:
Suicide among trans-identified youth is significantly elevated compared to the general population of youth (Biggs, 2022; de Graaf et al., 2020). However, the “transition or die” narrative, whereby parents are told that their only choice is between a “live trans daughter or a dead son” (or vice-versa), is both factually inaccurate and ethically fraught. Disseminating such alarmist messages hurts the majority of trans-identified youth who are not at risk for suicide. It also hurts the minority who are at risk, and who, as a result of such misinformation, may forgo evidence-based suicide prevention interventions in the false hopes that transition will prevent suicide.
“The ‘transition or die’ narrative regards suicidal risk in trans-identified youth as a different phenomenon than suicidal risk among other youth,” Levine and his colleagues explained. “Making them an exception falsely promises the parents that immediate transition will remove the risk of suicidal self-harm.”
Levine pointed to “biased online samples that rely on self-report” that have warned of an “alarmingly high risk of suicide.”
Among the reporters of such “evidence” is the Trevor Project, which was recently cited by transgender U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel (born Richard) Levine during an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered.
“Trans youth in particular are being hounded in public and driven to deaths of despair at an alarming rate,” the Biden top health official told NPR “in prepared remarks” at the end of April.
Condemning state legislation intended to curb child gender transition, Rachel Levine cited The Trevor Project for statistics:
Fifty-two percent of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the U.S. seriously contemplated killing themselves in 2020. Think about how many of them thought it was better to die than to put up with any more harassment, scapegoating and intentional abuse.
The Trevor Project’s “research,” and that conducted by others often cited by activists, “frequently conflates suicidal thoughts and non-suicidal self-harm with serious suicide attempts and completed suicides,” Stephen Levine and his colleagues stated, noting a recent analysis of data from the UK’s Tavistock pediatric gender clinic “found the rate of completed youth suicides to be 0.03% over a 10-year period, which translates into the annual rate of 13 per 100,000 (Biggs, 2022).”
“While this rate is significantly elevated compared to the general population of teens, it is far from the epidemic of trans suicides portrayed by the media,” he observed.
Beck related to Starbuck the ease with which the process of beginning his own transition occurred with Veterans Affairs after just one hour-long meeting, noting as well some of his transgender medical treatments were paid for by American taxpayers.
“I walked into a psychologist’s office; in one day I have a letter in my hand saying I was transgender,” he said. “I was authorized for hormones. I was authorized all this other stuff.”
“I had so much going wrong in my system when I started taking those,” he added. “Some of that was paid for by the VA, and I’m sorry to the American people that I did that.”
He observed this same process is happening with young children.
“As soon as [kids] go in and say, ‘I’m a tomboy’ … ‘This makes me feel comfortable,’ and then a psychologist … says, ‘Oh, you’re transgender,” he said. “And then the next day, you’re on hormones … the same hormones they used to use for medical castration for pedophiles. Now, they are giving this to healthy 13-year-olds.”
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Susan Berry, PhD is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Chris Beck” by Rumble.
