The White House has announced a formal ban on transgender people from serving in the military, which has left many LGBTQ+ rights groups aghast, while transgender service members worry about their future as they vow to continue to serve their country.

President Donald J. Trump released the memorandum announcing the ban late Friday night, clarifying speculation on the recommendations from Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis several weeks ago. Despite previous reports from unnamed sources to The Washington Post indicating that Mattis would recommend allowing transgender troops to continue serving, the final recommendations are that a near-full ban on transgender service will be the Pentagon’s policy going forward.

Under the new policy, any transgender person diagnosed with gender dysphoria will be deemed unfit for duty. Despite an exemption for those who have come out and begun medically transitioning under the previous Obama-era policy, the recommendation report itself cites oft-repeated right-wing rhetoric regarding trans issues, from the claim that transition-related medical treatment doesn’t effectively treat gender dysphoria; to privacy concerns for cisgender female service members; to inflated medical costs as justification for ejecting trans service members from the military ranks, and denying new recruits who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

“For the first time in military history, service members are being told that you cannot have medical treatment that your military doctor says is necessary,” says Mara Keisling, Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality in a phone interview. “That’s pretty stunning. We owe medically necessary care to these folks who are serving us. We used to have presidents who cared about service members.”

Despite news of the ban, several trans service members who spoke with them. remain steadfast in their commitment to serve their country with distinction. “Tomorrow, transgender service members will lace up their boots and go to work in service to this nation just as they have been doing for years. I'm confident that as a nation we will get to a point where our service is valued in the same way as every other American who dons our nation's uniform,” says Air Force Lt. Col. Bree Fram, a genderfluid person, over online messenger, vowing to serve her country until the end. “The statement released by the administration today is background noise that can only serve to distract us from our mission to fight and win our nation's wars.”

The bulk of the Pentagon’s report was devoted to how accommodating trans service members would affect military readiness. For example, the report repeatedly emphasizes the amount of time that may be missed by a trans service member due to hormone replacement therapy or transition-related surgery.

“Currently I have transgender service members already deployed. They’re in various remote locations including Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan and all of those places,” says Navy Lt. Cmdr. Blake Dremann in a phone interview, a trans man who is also president of Sparta, an organization that advocates for and supports actively serving LGBTQ+ military members and veterans. “We consistently give twelve months worth of medication to people who go into war zones to make sure that they have their medication, including blood pressure medication, malaria medication. I mean I got a whole thing of malaria pills for the whole 365 days that I was in Afghanistan.”

Dremman explains that going by the recently released Department of Defense deployability standards, which states that service members regardless of gender identity may not be nondeployable for greater than twelve months consecutively, medically transitioning shouldn’t automatically deem a service member as unfit for duty. “There is no point in transition that a person is non-deployable for twelve consecutive months. Not a single person that is currently serving has been non-deployable for twelve consecutive months for any reason related to transition. That again tells you that we are meeting deployability standards, and to say differently is incorrect.”