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.
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.
