The American Red Cross is now allowing gay and bisexual men to donate blood without restrictions that specifically single out a person’s sexual orientation or gender, the nonprofit group said Monday.
The American Red Cross is now allowing gay and bisexual men to donate blood without restrictions that specifically single out a person’s sexual orientation or gender, the nonprofit group said Monday.
And it only took… *checks notes* 40 years!
You know why it started, right?
You know HIV has been screenable for most of those 40 years, right?
A lot of haemophiliacs got HIV. I don’t blame them for making a policy decision.
Again, it has been screenable for decades. Just like many other blood-borne diseases. Why single out HIV as if it is impossible to filter out of the supply?
Screening accuracy is lightyears better today than it was decades ago.
Also, many things on the screening test won’t kill you in the event of a false negative on screening. A false negative for HIV screening meant a certain death sentence for the recipient, and that was true until just a few years ago.
HIV never was ‘singled out’. There are numerous other behaviors and activities that disqualify a potential donor that have nothing to do with HIV.
Are you for fucking real? Don’t pretend it’s not still a life shattering disease.
You can’t just say, “oh well, it’s not as bad as it used to be.” There’s a vast spectrum between “it won’t kill you” and “it’s a total nothingburger” (wow, does that ever sound familiar). Now you’re immunocompromised, something you definitely do not want in this day and age. Now you risk passing it onto partners and children. Now your quality of life is degraded decades earlier than it otherwise would be.
Now imagine you contracted it, not because you voluntarily engaged in behaviors and you knew the risks, but because you received life-saving medical care. Then imagine learning it might have been prevented if the organization responsible was concerned with pandering to sexual identity politics than ensuring product safety.
This is, and has always been, about safety. Screening has improved. Research has provided more data on prevention and monitoring. They wouldn’t have changed the policies otherwise.
So…you agree with my position that Red Cross had good reason for the ban for the past several decades but choose to attack me because my argument wasn’t vicious enough? I think you arguing with the wrong person here, tbh.
Shit, you know what, I think I may have over-interpreted your phrasing to mean that HIV is no big deal because it’s no longer a short term death sentence.
It absolutely was singled out. You have to specifically say you haven’t had gay sex when you donate blood. I’ve done it plenty of times.
“Singled out” implies that that it stood alone as the only behavior that was screened for. But that’s not the case. There always have been and still are numerous other behaviors and activities screened for and denied.
No, ‘singled out’ means they made a special exception for it that they made for nothing else. They didn’t even ask if you had HIV, just if you had gay sex, as if you can’t get HIV from heterosexual sex. It was never about HIV, it was about marginalizing gay people once again. And you’re excusing it. Shameful.
To be a bigot? And to discriminate? That’s your rationale to ban people?
I’m gay.
So am I. Still don’t think a blanket ban on the LGBT was the right call
They phrased it “men who have sex with men” because that was - and is - undeniably a huge risk factor in the transmission of HIV. It was an unprecedented public health emergency and I don’t think people nowadays quite understand how severe it was. Which is great, really, we’ve come such a long way.
Communication infrastructure was nothing like it is today either, there was a real absence of information and people were extremely scared, especially gay men watching their friends die. A blanket ban was the only sane thing to do in the circumstances.
Did it need to persist so long, perhaps not, but even 20 years ago AIDS was much less preventable and treatable than it is today. And the gears of bureaucracy turn extremely slowly at the best of times.
As someone else has pointed out, this is far from the only group excluded from the donor pool. It’s not a moral judgment, just a screening heuristic at the demographic level. That’s how things have to operate at the level of public services; i.e. population-level policy.
I agree. As I said in another comment, the book And The Band Played On is a great history of the AIDS epidemic in the USA and really hammers home just how devestating it was to gay men. It’s a fact that gay men are the major risk group in the West for HIV transmission. Heterosexual sex is much less likely to spread it compared to anal sex. There was a lot of mismanagement of it, but screening was a good idea, when it was finally introduced.