Chris Beck was never one of your gargantuan-type Navy SEALs. There are those types, of course, men chiseled from granite at 120 percent human scale, men who seem to drain several drams of testosterone from everyone else when they walk into a room. But you’d be surprised at the body types you find in the SEAL teams. Your smaller fellows, your stringy fellows, the guy with almost literally zero percent body fat who had to eat two Papa John’s pizzas every day through SEAL training just so he wouldn’t die of hypothermia in the water. Chris himself was on the smaller side, more like an undersized walk-on linebacker who lacked the size and pedigree of some of his more highly recruited peers but played with an intensity and pain tolerance that endeared him to coaches and TV commentators.
And yet, as he slipped on a pair of panty hose in his sailboat on this night in 1996, Chris couldn’t help wishing he were more petite, more womanly. He always wanted that when he wore women’s clothing. To be just a little bit prettier. It felt good even to wish that.
Chris finished putting on his outfit and walked barefoot up the ladder and onto the deck of his boat. Dusk was fast disappearing in San Diego Bay, the red lights of the Coronado Bridge blinked on, the weaponized beachhead of the naval station loomed cloud-colored to the west. Chris was 30 years old then, living on a 48-foot wooden William Garden ketch that he’d bought in a state of disrepair for $12,000 and fixed himself. He opened a Sam Adams, the beer of patriots, and had a seat. He was wearing a wig, and the way it felt in the wind called up a pleasant feeling of longing. Chris loved the deck of his boat at night. He could feel the inhuman mass of the ocean shifting beneath him and hear the clanking of the rigging and the water against the timber hull, which just sounded better than it does on fiberglass. But otherwise he was erased from the world. “Being invisible,” he thought, “is a relief.”
He’d flown back from a training deployment in Thailand earlier in the week. He’d taken a taxi from the base to a garage he rented, picked up his motorcycle, and ridden it down to Fiddler’s Cove. He’d undressed to his shorts, stuffed his clothes in a plastic bag, and swam the half mile to the sailboat he lived on—it was cheaper than sharing a house, like most of the other, younger SEALs stationed in Coronado did. He’d found his boat, as always, sealed up tight. He would leave it spotless, because he never knew when fate would dictate that he wouldn’t be the one opening it up. It was part of the process of shipping out, a ritualized preparation for death that would always have a kind of dreadful power over him. The washing of bedclothes, the bleaching of sinks, the removal of any speck of organic matter, the rewriting of his “dead letters” to be distributed to his friends and relatives should he not return, all of them signed with that quote from the end of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Thanks for all the fish.” Of course, Chris also had to purge all his panty hose and dresses and wigs and shoes—“I want to have honor in death” was how he thought about it.
Over the course of his 20-year career, Chris would serve in the Balkans during the civil war there. He would serve during the first Gulf War; fight pirates across the Horn of Africa; drive into Iraq in 2003 ahead of the invasion. He would spend years on small firebases in Afghanistan, snatching Taliban leaders; operate alone in the tribal belt along the Pakistan border, wearing a long beard and Pashtun garb, convening with Taliban agents and tribal warlords. Though it’s certain he’s killed people, I’m not privy to the details, because I know that to ask such questions is to reveal something truly base in myself. But I know Chris would be awarded the Bronze Star with valor, the Purple Heart, the Meritorious Service Medal, and about 50 other ribbons and medals. He would dislocate a shoulder, shatter a kneecap, be hit by a rocket-propelled grenade on his fortieth birthday, break two vertebrae in his back on a boat near Somalia and complete the mission anyway, and fly home sleeping among the flag-draped coffins of 19 of his brothers.
But even coming back from a training deployment in Thailand, it would usually take Chris a few days to find the release valve on his psyche. And by tonight he’d gotten the boat all opened up and aired out—made a run to get beer and another to a vintage store where he bought his dresses and shoes. And now, sitting there on the deck, he finally felt relaxed.
He’d had a few beers when he saw the running lights on a boat nearby switch on. His friend Mike was home. Mike had been a good friend since SEAL training and was also living on a boat in Fiddler’s Cove. Chris had a thought—he would go over and visit Mike. He considered it for a long time. And then he found himself climbing down the ladder of his boat, careful not to rip the dress. He got into his dinghy and began rowing toward Mike’s boat. He stopped for a moment and drifted. What the fuck was I thinking? But of course, being Chris, he found it impossible not to confront something, once the idea had occurred to him. Forward progress was irresistible to him.
“Hey,” Chris called from the dark. “You home, brother? Mind if I come up for a beer?”
“That you, Chris?” Mike called back. “Come on up.”
Chris tied his dinghy. He climbed up out of the dark and onto the boat, where Mike was sitting in a deck chair. Chris stepped out in bare feet, in the little black wig and some lipstick and blush that he didn’t really know how to apply. He smiled at Mike, like an idiot.
“Whoa, dude,” Mike said. “What? What’s up with the dress?”
“Well,” Chris said, “I like to do this sometimes.”
Chris could feel his heart beating in his mouth now. There was a feeling he had parachuting out of helicopters at night that he called jumping into the black. It was the embodiment of risk: You were leaping into a dangerous unknown. And that’s what Chris thought of, standing there. On weekends he sometimes ventured out, as he called it, dressed—the fear of being caught appealed to the part of him that was addicted to risk. But if Mike did not react well, Chris’s career would be over. When I spoke to him this fall, Mike said he believed this had been Chris’s way of asking Mike if he wanted to have a relationship. He was a stranger to her own feelings then, and he thinks this must have been some blind way of trying to figure it out.
“I’m from California, so I’m cool,” Mike said. “But never let the guys see this.”
They changed the subject. Chris and Mike drank beer for a couple of hours as if everything were normal; then Chris got back in his dinghy and rowed home. They never talked about it afterward.
“It was buried in my brain, I guess,” Mike said when we spoke. “Because I didn’t remember it at all. I hadn’t thought of it until his sister called me 15 years later and said, ‘He’s starting to dress more and more.’ I guess that was how it all changed.”
I have been in conversation with Kristin Beck for a year and a half. If you consider that five years ago there was no such person named Kristin Beck, you could say that I’ve known her for 30 percent of her life. That first time I saw Kristin, in 2014, she was a vision. Stepping out of an exit at Logan Airport at the end of an awful winter. The wind catching the hem of her burled wool dress as she clutched her lapel closed against the cold. She looked glamorous but chaste in her stockings and patent leather purse, like a flight attendant from a religiously conservative country. This was, I assumed, the person who had been living, latent, inside Chris Beck for years. A person in panty hose, enveloped in a cloud of floral perfume. And now that the inside matched the outside, or so the narrative was supposed to go, Kristin Beck was the woman she was always meant to be. There was someone else at the airport to meet Kristin, too. Kristin had flown up to give a talk to an LGBT group at Harvard, and a woman had offered to be Kristin’s host for the weekend. They’d never met, but they’d been nurturing this deep e-mail friendship, and it seemed to me the woman was a little starstruck. She’d brought an enormous bouquet of flowers—a great volume of freesia and roses that seemed in constant danger of combusting in the wind—and now she made a show of presenting it. I guess Kristin had confessed in an e-mail that she’d never been given flowers. All her life she’d imagined what it’d be like to be greeted at the airport with roses and told how beautiful she looked. This was a moment of wish fulfillment for Kristin Beck. She was making up for lost time.
Everyone, it seemed, was a little starstruck. That night I had dinner with her and a local couple at a basement sushi restaurant in Boston. He was a cop out of Worcester with a salt-and-pepper goatee and two sleeves of tattoos; she was a transgender woman of East Asian descent with stunning makeup—flawless skin and lips that appeared to be made of pink tinted glass. We were all assembled at this table because we wanted to be near Kristin Beck. And it wasn’t the transgender part we were most fascinated by, it was the Navy SEAL part. It’s hard to remember that there was a time when people didn’t really know what Navy SEALs were, a time before Captain Phillips and American Sniper and Lone Survivor and Zero Dark Thirty and No Easy Day, before we’d conducted the better part of a decade and a half of combat that seemed to center around the American Special Forces. And here we were, in the presence of a former member of SEAL Team 6, the very unit responsible for the events depicted in all those books and movies, a person who’d been given a front-row seat to possibly the most secretive, militaristic era in American history. Every time Kristin even looked at the cop’s girlfriend, the girlfriend giggled, covering her mouth with her hand as if she were embarrassed of her teeth.
“I was always real good at rugby,” Kristin was telling us, recounting the kind of kid she was. “I was good at running sports, not glamour sports. I played football, but I was more of a linebacker type than a quarterback type. I guess I was always an outsider.” Kristin speaks in a kind of husky whisper, and there’s a preternatural calm about her. A resting heart rate of probably like 10. All the SEALs I talked to were like this. But in Kristin there are also resonant strains of a bruised gentleness.
Kristin Beck was born Chris Beck 49 years ago to a football coach and a housewife in the blizzard belt of the Northeast. She spent her early years with her four brothers and sisters living in your greater Buffalos, your eastern Pennsylvanias. They shot guns; they drove trucks. You might be tempted to say that from the beginning, two selves began to form in that single body, Kristin and Chris. A bifurcated soul. Like twins, only one of them had consumed the other, so the second grew only inside. Kristin started wearing girls’ clothes when she was only 5 years old. In junior high, she’d pretend to be sick so she could stay home and wear her sister’s dresses and panty hose—her whole life, she would keep a stash somewhere, collect and purge—and then put everything away before her mother got home in the afternoon. Until the age of 45, she largely “dressed” only in the privacy of her own home, but every Halloween she’d go out as a cheerleader or a nurse.
And meanwhile, Chris was a boy. And not just physically. Chris seemed to possess a concentrated strain of boyness. He might not have been the biggest kid, but there was never anyone he was afraid to fight. He loved guns. He loved motorcycles, and he bought his own when he was in high school. And when his mother forbade him to have a motorcycle, he moved out of his house and spent the winter in the woods in upstate New York.
“If you pick a really good pine tree, that provides real nice shelter for you. And underneath are just layers of pine needles, so that’s your bed,” Kristin told me. “I was good with my hands, so I built a lean-to that turned out pretty good. I used to eat my meals at this halfway house. I would always hang out with the Vietnam vets. I don’t know, I was always just drawn to kinda messed-up combat vets.”
From as long as anyone can remember, it wasn’t that Chris was comfortable with confrontation. It was more like he needed it. “There was something about Chris,” Kristin’s college friend Ron told me, “where he had to challenge himself. He had to break down the front door. We played lacrosse together at Virginia Military Institute, and Chris Beck wasn’t what you’d call a finesse player. He wanted to run right through you, not go around. Or like, it was not unusual for me to get into a situation where Chris had challenged an entire fraternity to a fight.”
What's the scariest thing you’ve ever done?
“One was parachuting out of a plane into the ocean with so much gear I was pretty sure I was going to drown, but knowing it was my job to do it, so I couldn’t back out. The other was walking out of the house in a dress. I just wish I was prettier! Then I wouldn’t just be a dude in a dress.”
Have people confronted you in public like that?
“Yeah. Like, I remember once I was at a bar and a dude was laughing at me and getting in my face. And I was like, ‘I’m taking my shoes off, and then I’m going to start fighting. And if I do that, I’m gonna hurt you real bad. And it’s gonna be a dude in a dress hurting you real bad, and your friends are over there watching.’ When I turn that on, people can just tell not to mess with me. So I let him walk away and pretend that I backed down.”
What do you think about Caitlyn Jenner?
“I’d love to have nothing about Caitlyn Jenner in this story. What does she represent? She represents living in a Hollywood bubble with bodyguards and getting whatever she wants. It’s reality TV, which isn’t real at all. What does she have to do with the rest of America? She doesn’t represent me. Or the girls who have nothing and are forced into sex work. Our ability not to be objectified, our ability not to be sexualized.”
Once, in New York, Kristin told me she still wrote dead letters. At this point, Kristin seemed to be shedding stuff. She’d been long divorced by now—she was married and had two children back in her SEAL days, family it is still painful for her to discuss. And now she’d sold her house in Tampa and was living in an RV. But still, whenever she went on a trip, she couldn’t help but fall back on the old rituals. “When I left to come up to New York,” she told me, “I’m making everything all neat in the RV, and everything’s put away. And I still have my dead letters and a couple of piles of stuff to give people. So if I die, everything’s neat.”
Over the course of her time in the SEALs, that release valve she used to find on the deck of her boat got harder to locate. She’d come home from deployment and drink. She’d punch holes in walls. She’d ride her motorcycle all night, ditch it on her front lawn, and sleep on the floor of the garage.
“I was just volunteering for a lot of missions,” Kristin said when I asked her about the toll these two enormous stresses (what she was doing for work and what she was hiding from everyone) took on her. “And like the kind of missions I was doing, they were like really trying to be in the thick of it. I think I had a lot of that I don’t care attitude. It was an internal struggle. It wasn’t suicidal, but I wasn’t trying that hard to stay around.”
But she would always dress. She would fly home from months of doing two or three missions a night, it’s safe to assume from killing people with her bare hands, and she would close the door to her bedroom and secretly put on dresses and panty hose and wigs and makeup. Even after missions sometimes, when she’d return to a firebase to sleep for a few hours, she would let her mind drift and start thinking about dressing just to try to relax.
When was the first time you had sex?
“It was in college. The first couple years at VMI, I still hadn’t had sex. First time I ever had sex with a girl, it was 1988, so I was 21.”
Why do you think you hadn’t had sex?
“I think I was scared? I don’t know, it was just never an obsession for me. It just never clicked.”
Have you ever had sexual experiences with men?
“Once. I realized pretty quickly it wasn’t for me.”
What do you think people misunderstand about you, sexually?
“When I wear these clothes, all of this, there is zero sex to it. It’s not a turn-on, it’s not a fetish. It makes me feel relaxed is how I can best describe it. It’s a decompression.”
The last time I was with Kristin, she had just gotten married to a woman, a young Air Force sergeant—Kristin had sold the RV and was living on a farm in Maryland. She met me wearing a black turtleneck sweater and jeans. It had been a year and a half since I first saw her, and the flight attendant in the red dress seemed to be gone; Kristin said she doesn’t really wear that many dresses now. In 2013, when she first told friends she was transgender, she figured she was going to become a woman. She had started hormone therapy and was in discussions with a doctor about gender-reassignment surgery. But that’s changed.
“I still like to dress up sometimes. I like to be beautiful. But on a normal day, I’m driving around my farm in my boots.”
She’s now stopped the hormone therapy because it was damaging her kidneys, and she’s decided not to have surgery.
When I tell people about Kristin Beck, they tend to have theories. A popular one is that she was born a woman, but in a man’s body. And that the psychic terror it caused drove her to become a Navy SEAL. She was driven to go someplace where they would never let you become a woman. And for a while, that’s what Kristin believed, too. That she was pretending to be one thing but was really another. But since I met her, she’s realized that she has not been born again. She has not shed a false identity for a true one. “I am still 100 percent Chris Beck. He’s here,” she says. “Part of me is still that Conan the Barbarian. I would always have been a Navy SEAL, no matter if I’d been open about who I was earlier. I wouldn’t have been happy if I hadn’t.” Kristin Beck is a woman who likes to ride standing up on her 1960 Harley-Davidson (that she rebuilt by hand), who loves to give the gift of hand grenades, who talks fondly of her sniper rifle. And she also easily falls into reveries about wearing gorgeous dresses and having her picture taken. “Being told I’m pretty, being treated nice,” she says. “I want that.”
It’s a weird thing to say, but talking about transgender people has become a trend. Which is a good thing. “Visibility is good,” as Kristin says. But trends are also reductive and facile and sometimes dehumanizing while letting everyone off the hook. It’s like using the hashtag Black Lives Matter and thinking—well, we took care of racial injustice, let’s go have brunch. A trend usually fails to make a connection between people like Kristin Beck and the rest of us. Kristin Beck’s story isn’t just about the relatively small number of people who are born with the traits of a gender they don’t identify with. Aren’t most of us hiding some part of ourselves? Would we not, most of us, be terrified at having to walk out into the world with that part of ourselves on the outside? Are we not, often, made up of impulses and identities that seem like they can’t exist together? What Kristin Beck is asking is: What happens if you feel like a Navy SEAL and a woman in a red dress accepting a bouquet of flowers from an admirer at an airport? Are any of us really just one thing? Aren’t we all made up of a bunch of conflicting identities (masculine and feminine, liar and self-righteous, etc.) that we’ll never be able to make fit together? And how do we bear life, knowing we are so many things that can never be reconciled?
“You get this pressure to be one thing or another, to be binary,” Kristin said. “In a way, it’s not that different from anyone. My conflict is just a lot more visual.”
Late on the afternoon we first met, Kristin’s host from the LGBT group suggested we go to a fortune-teller in Salem, Massachusetts. Salem is a strange, bewitched little town. Part Ben & Jerry’s, part occult Colonial ghosts. The light was dying as we crossed the brittle snow from the parking lot. The fortune-teller’s name was High Priestess Lori Bruno, and she belonged to an order of witches. High Priestess Lori was in her mid-seventies. Come in, my sweets, come in, she said, welcoming us into a room choked with silver baubles and stained-glass lamps draped with silk scarves. She had a hard candy in her mouth. She looked at us, sucking on her butterscotch and murmuring approval like a grandmother beaming with pride at the miracle of what we’d become. High Priestess Lori seems to have a talent for opening even the least likely heart.
Kristin crossed her legs demurely and seemed to make herself smaller in the chair. She was willing to receive some truths if High Priestess Lori turned out to be a person who could deliver them. Kristin had certainly seen stranger things. “I see an L coming into your life,” Lori told Kristin. “A Lisa, a Louis.” She said, “It’s a good time to buy real estate.” She said, “Something really big is coming on the horizon, Kristin. It’s so good, so good!” Then High Priestess Lori stopped talking, as if catching wind of something she hadn’t noticed before. She sat, her lightly mustached lips puckered around a dissolving butterscotch.
Kristin then looked at Lori with great seriousness. “Will I ever have a home?” she said. Her voice was a whisper now. Not because she was afraid of what we’d think. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Kristin Beck afraid. But because she felt some humility before what was for her a very diffcult question.
It had been a long, long time since Kristin had had a home—probably since she split from her wife and reluctantly moved away from her children nine years ago. As a SEAL, you can start to lose your taste for home. You are forever packing out. Doing your purge, burning the hose and dresses, writing new versions of your dead letters. You’re deployed so often, your connection to place dims. You can even start to feel a little alienated by your possessions. The couches, the televisions. And even as a civilian, it seemed to continue. Just in the year and a half I’ve known her, Kristin has sold her house in Tampa, given away her furniture and even a few of her favorite guns (including the cool Saturday-night special), bought an RV, driven it up to her old homestead near Wellsville, New York, then quit Wellsville just as fast with an idea to find some land in the Blue Ridge Mountains and possibly a dog, only to meander back down the seaboard. It’s only natural, then, to wonder when the soul will stop wandering.
I hope I’m not drawing the metaphor too far to say that I believed that afternoon she was also asking whether she might also find a durable identity to settle down into, given that her soul had been given no quarter for such a long time, that a part of her was purged at every redeployment, writing its own dead letter.
“You are finding it,” High Priestess Lori said. “It may not be what you expect it to be, but you are finding it.”
Devin Friedman is GQ’s director of editorial projects.
