Kristin Beck served for two decades in the US military before transitioning to female and she has a message for former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.

‘I was the best of the best … I am twice the man that you could ever be!’ the former Christopher Beck tweeted to Huckabee who does not believe transgender people should be able to serve.

‘The military is not a social experiment,’ Huckabee said during the 6 August debate of 10 of the 17 Republicans running for president.

Huckabee had also said: ‘The purpose of the military is to kill people and break things. It’s not to transform the culture by trying out some ideas that some people think would make us a different country and more diverse. The purpose is to protect America. I’m not sure how paying for transgender surgery for soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines makes our country safer.’

Last month, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced a working group has been created to examine ‘the policy and readiness implications of welcoming transgender persons to serve openly.

Beck served in special operations and received the Bronze Star and Purple Heart and is now running for a congressional seat from Maryland.

She talked to The Daily Beast about Huckabee’s comments and said: ‘Right now he’s being derogatory and disrespectful to a huge part of the nation—with the amount of transgender people in America who have wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. People who understand who we are. [Our population] could go as high as 20 to 25 million people…[These are] people he should be serving, and he doesn’t care about us.’