Here’s a question: if you examine a vial of a straight person’s blood and an LGBTQ person’s blood, how do you tell them apart? The answer: you don’t, because while human blood may have distinctions of type and traces of the originator’s general health and lifestyle, it bears no imprint of their gender or sexuality.
Yet for decades, nonsensical rules were kept in place to at first completely prevent and then significantly restrict men and trans women who had sex with men from providing blood donations, even through recent critical blood shortages around the country. That’s finally changed last week as the Food and Drug Administration has adopted more sensical standards that will still take into account risky sexual practices, but without specific regard for sexual orientation or gender identity.
The reason that the rules were kept in place for so long was quite simply the offensive stereotype that men who have sex with men are more likely to have HIV that it was considered practical to completely bar them from participation rather than ask targeted questions or just screen the blood.
Even beyond the issues with this hackneyed prejudgment, it is, obviously, not actually necessary to estimate the likelihood that a sample contains certain diseases. We have long been able to pretty easily test blood to confirm whether it not it is usable, making the prohibitions even more puzzling and insulting. Certainly a patient on the operating table, facing the prospect of blood loss without a reliable replacement, will care much more about whether a batch of blood has gone through the standard rigorous testing rather than if the donor happened to be gay.
This is, incidentally, as good a representation as any of how bigotry ultimately hurts everyone, not just those to whom it is directed. For years, the blood supply was constrained essentially by remnants of the midcentury gay panic. As the shortages recede, we should have a hard think about the many other and often non-obvious ways prejudice is holding us back.
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