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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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And it only took... *checks notes* 40 years!
Technically still waiting on it to happen. If you've had anal sex, you still have to wait 3 months. So they are still discriminating against most MSM.
No, it isn't. Anal sex is a known high risk factor for STDs and infections. It also applies to everyone, not just gay/bi men.
For a lot of these people their (secular) religion is erasing real-world group differences. The fact that you can (whatever your sexual orientation) regularly engage in anal sex, and therefore be at a higher-risk of contracting STIs for physiological reasons, and therefore not be eligible to donate blood---and still be a good person is beyond their ability to square.
If we value your personhood equally then there must be no substantive physiological differences between you and anybody else.
Yes, it's entirely about what you do, not what you are. Nothing to do with identity, only practice. This seems to be very hard for younger people to grasp, because increasingly society seems to conflate the two. That's not particularly meant as an accusation, just an observation.
Theoretically, it applies to everyone. The anti-sodomy laws also technically applied to everyone, but were only enforced against the LGBT community.
It is good that now they will at least screening those who have heterosexual intercourse, but most MSM still won't be able to donate with the various restrictions. Only MSM in a long-term relationship will be able to donate.
I can understand the biological reason for not allowing certain medications to avoid complications. However, they could still take blood and just keep it separate just as plasma centers that take MSM plasma do. If there really is a shortage, they should be taking everything being offered.
Not really, it specifies "new partners," which is completely fair. People lie, and it allows time for symptoms to show up so the red cross doesn't end up wasting resources. I don't really know how they'd work out polycules unless they add a monogamous restriction. The three months it's about safety since they are dealing with blood.
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.
You want to lay off that nerdohol, mate. It does terrible things to you.
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.
It's a bit more complicated than that. In the early years of the HIV epidemic they at first didn't even want to screen donors. The blood banks and the FDA were slow to introduce screening for a few reasons, one being that gay men were such good donors that a large proportion of the blood supply would have been removed. Eventually the risk became too great and do screening was introduced, just like we exclude those who were in Britain when TSEs were a risk. Note that these restrictions also never applied to lesbians, because they are not a high risk group.
40 years ago contracting HIV was still a serious, life threatening event. It's also true that in the USA homosexual men represented one of the largest risk groups, unlike in Africa where other factors made spread between heterosexuals more common. It took hold in the gay male community due to the higher risk of anal sex, the popularity of bath houses, and the amount of sex men were having basically. Testing for HIV was also expensive. You could do it at the batch stage to reduce testing, but then you throw away a lot of blood. It's only recently that PreP is widely available and used, so that HIV is more manageable (though it is still a serious illness).
My source for most of this is And The Band Played On, which apart from being one of the saddest books I ever read, outlines well the inaction by politicians, medical funding bodies, and even within the gay community itself, in tackling the epidemic. That it was allowed to happen is a black mark on the Reagan presidency.
They made special exceptions for people who live or travel to specific regions, they made special exceptions for people who have received certain medical procedures, they made special exceptions for needle-based drug users, they made special exceptions for people who've gotten tattoos or piercings, they made special exceptions for other sexual behaviors like paying for sex. You do know what the definition of the word "singled" means, yeah? It means "single" - as in "one". They didn't single out just that one behavior.
Yet again- they only asked if you had gay sex. They didn't ask if you had sex. HIV can be transmitted through any kind of sex. Are you really not aware of that? Because if you are aware of that, why just ask about gay sex?
I'm not going to mansplain the statistics to you when you can just as easily go look them up yourself. Or choose not to. I don't care.
So you don't know that HIV can be transferred through heterosexual sex? Really?
do
you
even
epidemiology
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.