this isn't updating blood donation rules for LGBTQ+ men. It's updating blood donation rules for straight men who've had sexual encounters with other men. https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/1245758733596200971

it used to be that anyone who'd ever had sex with another man since 1977 was banned. then in 2015 they changed it to "anyone who's had sex with another man in the past year", because a lot of men who aren't gay have had at least one sexual encounter with another man in their life

turns out, banning all the straight guys who've ever jerked off with their buddies in their locker rooms in high school, or with their fellow servicemen while deployed... rules out a lot of people who aren't gay!

the percentage of cis gay men who have not had sex with another man in the past year might as well round to 0%. it's so impossibly low, there's no sense in designing sweeping federal policy changes around them.

on the other hand, while the percentage of cis bi guys who have not had sex with another man in the past year *is* nonzero, you'll have a very hard time convincing me that the FDA's designing its blood donation policies with bisexual men in mind.

....like, the fact that this was discussed for 30+ years as "the gay blood ban" should be a hint

and what about trans men?

well, it turns out that the FDA has a really weird way of thinking about trans people, which more or less boils down to "pretend trans people don't exist", which has some interesting implications for trans people

As of 2015, the FDA classified donors based on their sex assigned at birth, which meant that trans men were misclassified as "women", and therefore not subject to the blood ban on men who have sex with men.

(NB: The FDA had a separate policy governing women who had sex with men who have sex with men, but the deferral period is much shorter (either 90 or 365 days), so trans men who had sex with cis gay men could have fallen under that, but not necessarily)

This also meant that trans women were wrongly classified as men, so trans women who had sex with men *were* disqualified under the ban, even though they're not gay men.

Note: donation centers sometimes have their own policies that are more restrictive than what the FDA allows (or sometimes creative interpretations), so if you're trans and had a different experience donating blood, that's not surprising! Here I'm just talking FDA policy

So, saying the FDA updated the rules for LGBTQ+ men is wrong, because

- L: I'm not sure what "[cis] lesbian man" means?
- G: this applies to 0% of gay men
- B: the FDA doesn't know bisexuality exists
- T: this doesn't apply trans men

(regarding "lesbian man": not all lesbians are women, but AFAIK, all lesbians I've seen who are men are trans or gender nonconfroming, and therefore not covered by this FDA policy in the first place)

anyway, this new policy sucks approximately as much as the old policy, (which sucked approximately as much as the old old policy) and framing any of these as a "win" for "LGBTQ+ men" or a step towards "inclusion" is straight-up pinkwashing and erasure

homophobia means people are turning down COVID-19 treatment from people who are clinically proven *not* to have HIV, because they'd rather get treated with blood from someone of unknown HIV status (or, more likely, not get treated at all) https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/doctors-can-t-use-covid-19-antibodies-gay-men-or-n1174341