In January 2022, the American Red Cross declared what they called a “Blood Crisis.” Donation shortages, canceled drives and much more have put the country’s blood supply in shambles.
Health professionals are begging people to donate blood. They say it’ll save lives; it’s a civic good- nay, a civic duty!
I want to.
The FDA won’t let me.
While the Red Cross is a key organization in sourcing America’s donated blood, the buck does not stop with them. In fact, the group responsible for setting the policy and management around blood donations is the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA has a messy, complicated history with blood donation. They assumed the responsibility in 1972, after advances in medical science saw blood transfusions become commonplace in medical procedures.
Less than a decade after they took on the job, the FDA was staring down the barrel of one of America’s biggest public health disasters.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic wasn’t spotted by the press until 1981, but it’s believed to have been in the United States on a smaller scale much sooner than that.
In its early days, much of the outbreak was shrouded in mystery — at least to the government. Queer communities knew from the beginning what HIV was. Mysterious diseases had been killing gay men and their partners for decades. Before AIDS was even given its name, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis had been established. GMHC was founded by six gay men in New York who saw what was happening and stepped up to support their community in 1982.
The U.S. government wouldn’t begin funding AIDS research for another 18 months after GMHC’s founding.
Early on, it was discovered that AIDS had two main methods of transmission: sexual and bloodborne. Although the disease could affect anyone, HIV/AIDS was detected in disproportionate amounts among gay or bisexual men.
This crisis intersected with blood donation in 1983. Amid growing concerns about the spread of the disease, the U.S. government called together a special committee to hear from various groups about how to best control the spread.
One proposed policy, brought forward by the director of the CDC, was to establish moving forward the exclusion of gay men from blood donation. The population was deemed to be too “high risk” to be eligible for blood donation.
This policy was, of course, instantly protested by gay rights groups that attended the hearings. They argued that implementing it would be a catastrophe, an invasion of privacy and discriminatory.
After those hearings, in 1983, the FDA issued a blanket ban. Gay and bisexual men who had been sexually active in any way since 1977 would no longer be permitted to donate blood.
Now, as an immediate control measure, I can understand this policy. At the time, there was no way to test blood samples, or even individuals, for HIV/AIDS. Something needed to be done to control this spread.
The policy banning gay and bisexual men from donating blood would be in place until 2015.
This was no longer an immediate control measure; this was fearmongering.
In 1995, Tyrone Jones of The Harvard Crimson summed up the failings of the discriminatory policy.
“The issue I have with this regulation is that it creates a false sense of security by supporting the notion that HIV infection and AIDS are exclusively ‘gay’, and therefore, by protecting our blood supply from the blood of gay men, we are safe,” Jones wrote.
Queer men are not the only people who can contract or pass on AIDS, yet they are the ones targeted across all of the FDA’s regulatory language.
The FDA changed their regulation in 2015 to allow queer men to donate blood if they had not been sexually active for a year. Then in 2020, amid shrinking donation numbers, they shortened the “celibacy period” to just 3 months.
So where are we in 2022?
The regulations of the FDA are now so archaic that collection organizations are funding research to contradict the FDA’s policy, in hopes of opening up donor eligibility.
The blood donation shortage has gotten so bad that non-government organizations are declaring national crises to draw eyes to the issue.
Despite the staggering need for more donors, the FDA has failed to publish any information to inform the 1.5 million transgender Americans if they are eligible to donate blood.
In the FDA’s own current regulation justifying this policy, they cite a book entitled “HIV and the Blood Supply,” a collection of events that shines a light on how the FDA has completely failed to properly control this situation.
And to top everything off, AIDS hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s estimated that AIDS has been directly responsible for the deaths of 32 million people across the globe, with countless more infected. No long-term research was ever done to determine if the hard ban had any effect on spread in its 32-year span.
I have the benefit of being young.
I didn’t live through the height of the activism around the AIDS epidemic. I’ve never personally known anyone who’s died of the disease.
But I’m a trans woman walking in the footsteps of every queer person who’s come before me.
I know the pain that this policy has caused. I know it’s time for it to end.
It may seem silly to someone who isn’t LGBTQ. It’s donating blood, what’s the big deal?
I want to help.
My friends want to help.
The FDA won’t let us.
