A member of the elite Navy SEAL Team 6 has come out as a transgender woman in a new memoir entitled Warrior Princess. According to Think Progress, Kristen Beck’s memoir comes out Tuesday and details her journey through a 20-year military career to where she is today.

Beck retired from the military before the elite unit was sent into Pakistan to capture and kill Osama bin Laden. Born Chris Beck, Kristin began transitioning shortly after leaving the service.

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The former elite commando wrote her book with co-author Anne Speckhard, who told ABC News, “For years Chris had turned off his sexuality like a light switch and lived as a warrior, consumed with the battle — living basically asexual. For Chris the other SEALs were brothers and in the man’s man warrior lifestyle, even if he had wanted to entertain sexual thoughts, there really was never any time to be thinking too much about sexuality.”

Civilian life gave Beck a chance to start over, Speckhard said. “Now seemed the right time to go for it — to make his body match his identity — or at least start by dressing like a woman in his regular life.”

In the preface to Warrior Princess, Beck wrote that she made the decision to go public because she hopes “to reach out to all of the younger generation and encourage you to live your life fully and to treat each other with compassion, be good to each other, especially in your own backyard (where it be high school or your community).”