FDA doublespeak: How the FDA promotes homophobia in the medical world

Since the legalization of same-sex marriage throughout the United States, many gay individuals and allies seem to believe that the government has granted full legal equality. Sadly, this is not truly the case, and the fine print of the recent overturn of a 30-year FDA blood ban from gay and bisexual men truly shows how our system continues to act against LGBT Americans.

The blood ban was not removed. The FDA merely changed it from a lifetime ban to a requirement that a potential donor abstain from sex with another male for an entire year. This might seem like an advancement for equality, but in reality it’s a mere reconstruction of a discriminatory policy promoting HIV stigma, and reinforcing the belief that AIDS is a “gay” disease.

{mosads}The FDA blood ban was first enacted during the initial breakout of the disease as a measure to prevent spreading the virus, but since then the law has become outdated primarily due to new technology. According to the FDA, testing of donated blood has reduced HIV transmission through  donated blood from 1 in 2500 to 1 in 1.47 million. With such great progress HIV screening, the restrictions on men who have had sex with men is not only discriminatory but also highly unscientific.

Since the change of the FDA policy, the agency has publicly stated, “We have taken great care to ensure this policy revision is backed by sound science and continues to protect our blood supply.” This might sound reasonable given the relatively high HIV infection rate in the gay community. However, the rate has also drastically increased among black women and people over 50. Why is it that these groups of people are not restricted from donating blood? Why no age restriction seeing that infections are rising much faster for people over 50, than for those under 40 due to a lack of proper sex education, resulting in higher incidences of unprotected sex? If the FDA truly needed to promote sound science and protect the blood supply, they should have also placed the one year abstinence restriction on women of color and the elderly.

Worldwide, the association of  HIV with gay people has been used as a tool of government discrimination. Because of restrictive laws on HIV, people around the world are denied the ability to travel, use healthcare facilities, and seek employment. In fact, criminalization of key affected populations, including but not limited to gay individuals, has resulted in over 60 percent of countries having regulations or policies that create obstacles to getting treatment or care for HIV. The idea of needing to prevent or control HIV has also been used to support laws criminalizing homosexuality in over 75 countries as of 2015.

Even looking beyond the FDA blood regulations, discriminatory health care laws expand into all type of donations, ranging from organs to tissue. All this still occurs even though the American Medical Association recommends that such laws should be repealed due to their discriminatory nature. For instance,  if a man who has sex with men tries to donate an organ,  the receiver of the organ must be told that the donor has participated in sex with a man, even though such information is irrelevant given that organs are screened for disease. And then when it comes to tissue donation, a man cannot have had sex with another man in the past five years.

If this sounds inconsistent with risk, one just has to look at policies regarding heterosexual people. According to blood donation guidelines set by the FDA, a straight man who either pays for sex with a woman or knowingly has sex with a woman who is HIV positive only needs to wait a year. This merely shows how unsound the “scientific” policies set by the FDA are. How is it that sex with a person who has HIV is less of a risk than a man who has sex with a man who doesn’t have the virus?

When someone proclaims that our government equally values straight and gay individuals, all one has to do is look at their policies to see that’s simply not the case. Our health policies are merely perpetuating the negative stigma of gay men having AIDS, which only hurts the move towards equality. If the FDA wants to end its discrimination, it needs to remove these unscientific regulations and instead use a more comprehensive screening process that targets risky sexual behavior, such as not using condoms. So, whenever someone says marriage restrictions were the last barrier to equality, all you need to do is examine the facts to realize it’s only the beginning.

Sam Dunkovich is a political science major with a communication minor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is a Young Voices advocate.

The views expressed by authors are their own and not the views of The Hill.