The Food and Drug Administration must stop it’s discrimination of gay men regarding blood donation. The FDA’s requirements for the donation of blood (regarding all sexual orientations) are good health, a lack of infectious diseases at the time of donation and a buffer of six months from receiving a tattoo.
Except for gay men. Gay men are subject to an additional requirement of not having had sex with another man for one year, which has been relaxed to a three month period because of the short supply of blood donors during the COVID-19 epidemic.
Gay sex does not inherently have a higher risk of STD’s than other types sex. Sex is simply sex no matter who is doing it. While gay men do have a higher rate of infection with STD’s studies conducted by Oxford have shown that it is because of a higher number of sexual partners not because gay sex itself is the culprit.
There are many gay men who are in monogamous relationships, and even some gay men who only have a single sexual partner in their entire lifetime. Why should such a person be forced to abstain from sex with their partner to give blood?
Blood from a monogamous and chaste gay man is free of any infections or diseases, just as it is for any monogamous and chaste person of any other orientation. Blood from such an individual is safer than that of a person of straight orientation who has had multiple sexual encounters in the last year (or three months); yet it is a monogamous and chaste gay man who cannot give blood.
One solution would be to apply the higher standard to all orientations. Applying the standard of a year (or three months) from the time of any persons’ last sexual encounter would result in only celibate individuals being able to provide blood. Such an action would end in a disastrous shortage of blood.
Another solution would be to entirely relax the additional requirements of blood donation on gay men. Doing so would end in a net positive amount of available blood, but at the cost of time, nurses, blood testing and money.
The best solution would be to apply the higher standard with a small change: apply the requirement that any person with multiple sexual partners in the last three months not be allowed to donate blood. Such a higher standard would result in an increase of the quality of blood being donated across all sexual orientations and end the discrimination against gay men by the FDA.
Kent Martineau
Kent Martineau lives in Saratoga Springs.
