The Movie:

Now there's another reason for homophobic bigots to keep their mouths shut and let LGBT people live peaceful lives. If empathy and common decency is not available at your disposal, how about this: Next time you shoot your mouth off with homophobic slurs, there's a chance the recipient of your insults might be a decorated Navy Seal veteran who can kick your ass six ways from Sunday.

Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story is about just such a person and should provide an inspirational documentary for anyone struggling to be their true selves in a world that might not accept them. If a 20-year Navy veteran who has seen her share of action and found the strength within herself to come out as a transgender individual in a world that's intensely conservative and masculine, then perhaps others can take her example and follow suit.

Kristin Beck, formerly Christopher Beck, is a badass Navy Seal who retired from active duty in 2011 after twenty years of service. After keeping her true identity as a transgender person a secret up until her retirement, Beck decided to take on one more near-impossible challenge and decided to come out to a world she was understandably afraid wouldn't understand her. As she began her conversion process, she gradually realized that her family and friends supported her.

Even though directors Mark Herzog and Sandrine Orabona touch a little bit on the bigotry and hatred that she faces every day through social media and society in general, Lady Valor mostly focuses on the positive aspects of Kristin's new life. Kristin herself explains in one of the interviews included on the special features that since she had already seen so many documentaries about transgender people that focused more on their pain than their pleasure, she made sure that the film would show a truly open transgender life in a more positive light.

As far as I'm concerned, that's the right approach. I say good riddance to those idiots who don't understand that someone who sacrificed so much for her country deserves happiness via her true identity. The couple of minutes of screen time they get on the documentary is more than enough. Most of the doc's running time is about the support Kristin gets from her family.

Her sister accepts her as who she is immediately. Her brother and father have a bit of a harder time with it, but they come around eventually. One of the most emotional moments in the documentary occurs when Kristin's father refers to her in the correct gender pronoun for the first time in her life. It's a small moment as it happens during casual dinner table conversation, the way true change usually occurs in real life.

Even though Herzog and Orabona's approach is to create an inspirational and positive outlook on Beck's story, they don't shy away from delving into her personal problems, many of them apparently resulting from the aggravation she felt for years while living a repressed life. She got married to a woman and had kids, because that was the "normal" thing to do. But since she didn't know what to do in that situation, he went on overseas deployments as much as possible so she wouldn't have to deal with being a typical family man. Because she was disconnected from her children for so long, a big chunk of Lady Valor shows Kristin trying to reconnect with them. After seeing what she's been through, it's hard to not to wish her every happiness in the world.

The DVD:

Video:

Lady Valor presents one of the more impressive standard definition transfers of recent memory. Even though there are some minor video noise issues, such as aliasing, this is a very clear transfer of a documentary primarily shot with digital cameras.

Audio:

Two audio options are presented, both in Dolby Digital, 5.1 Surround and 2.0 Stereo. Either one should work fine and there isn't much of difference between them since the 5.1 track barely shows any surround presence. In either track, the interviews are heard clearly. This is an adequate audio transfer overall.

Extras:

Anderson Cooper Special: The one-hour (42 minutes as presented here without commercials) special that Anderson Cooper produced on Kristin Beck is presented in its entirety. The special covers a lot of ground the documentary already goes over in greater detail, so this can be skipped.

Interview With Kristin Beck: This is a new interview conducted to give an update on Kristin's life. She mostly talks about the continuing struggles of the transgender community and the film's success at film festivals.

We also get a Trailer.

Final Thoughts:

Even after the repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell", transgender people are still not allowed to join the military, even though thirteen other countries allow it today. Lady Valor is a heartfelt, inspirational and honest story about a remarkable woman whose story will hopefully make others realize that the T in LGBT is a lot stronger than previously thought.

Oktay Ege Kozak is a film critic and screenwriter based in Portland, Oregon. He also writes for The Playlist, The Oregon Herald, and Beyazperde.com