NORTHAMPTON — A day after President Donald Trump announced he wants transgender people barred from serving in the military, area trans advocates expressed dismay and a determination to fight the proposed change.

The president tweeted his views Wednesday, saying “tremendous medical costs and disruption” are associated with transgender people in military service.

If put into place, the ban would reverse a decision last year by President Barack Obama’s administration to allow transgender people to serve openly. On Thursday, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there would be no official change in policy until Defense Secretary Jim Mattis receives an authoritative directive to that effect (see accompanying story).

When Deja Greenlaw, 65, first heard about Trump’s announcement, she said she thought about all the things Trump was doing to destroy what Obama had done.

“You can’t ban an already marginalized group from entering the military,” said Greenlaw, a transgender woman from Enfield, Conn. “You just can’t. This is the United States.”

Greenlaw is a member of UniTy of the Pioneer Valley, a transgender support group in Springfield. Greenlaw works closely with the group’s executive director, Keri Stebbins, 73, of Springfield. Stebbins, a transgender woman, served in the Air Force for four years in the late 1950s. She said being transgender was always something she had to hide, otherwise she’d lose her job.

“When you serve in the military, you’re always afraid,” Stebbins said. “You always have that fear that if they found out, they’d kick you out.”

Lorelei Erisis, 44, trans woman and an activist in Northampton, said transgender people have been serving in the military for years. Until Obama’s decision last year, they had to keep it hidden.

Erisis said Trump’s tweet was really disrespectful and it is especially shameful coming from the president of the United States. Anyone who wants to enlist should be celebrated, not criticized, she added.

“It would be nice to be treated as equal citizens,” Erisis said. “We’re just fighting to exercise the same rights as everyone else. We just want human rights.”

The Defense Department will not change the policy until the White House officially sends them a rule change.

“You can’t officially change a policy via twitter, but it’s certainly a direct threat to anyone serving,” said Jennifer Levi, a law professor and expert for the Center for Transgender and Sexuality Studies at Western New England University. “The exclusion of servicemembers in this way is baseless.”

Levi said she believes the judicial system will not allow a policy crafted on bias to become official.

Obama announced last June that transgender service members could serve openly. The Pentagon then conducted research to identify the number of transgender service members, assess their military readiness and evaluate how to train leadership on the issue, Levi said.

A June 2016 Rand Corp. study estimated that the U.S. military has as many as 6,630 active-duty transgender service members.

“I think that it came as a great surprise to people yesterday for the president to state opposition to those conclusions,” she added. “It potentially affects thousands of people.”

The University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Stonewall Center, the campus’s LGBT resource center, issued a statement Wednesday saying the university was saddened by Trump’s announcement.

“Trans people have long participated in the armed forces and undoubtedly will continue to do so, even if they cannot be open about their gender identities,” the statement read.

Amherst College class of 1998 graduate and Army veteran Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said this decision placed personal politics and opinions above interests of national security.

“This announcement was like a hand grenade in terms of how disruptive it is to the military,” Rieckhoff said. “We have thousands of transgender people serving, transgender people sitting on checkpoints in combat zones, who have been undermined completely by our president.”

While others may be sad and angered, Greenlaw said she is energized because this is going to bring transgender people into the spotlight.

“If you want to fight, let’s go,” Greenlaw said. “I’ll stand up for what I believe. We have rights, back off.”

Stebbins said UniTy’s next step will be to discuss with the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, a Boston-based activist group, where to go from here. UniTy will continue to work with its friends and allies to fight this at the state and local level.

“We’re not going to sit back down on our laurels,” Stebbins said. “We never have.”

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