Follow up - Transgender Folks and Blood Donation

So after I made my last post a friend told me that the Red Cross generally does not allow blood donation by transgender folks. I immediately turned to Kendrick, who often has the conventional medical explanation. His response. "Why?!" Mine: "I don't know! Do they think it's catching? Is it because transgendered folks might have hormones?" (Here followed speculation on all the other kinds of screening that ought to be going on if they were in fact concerned about hormones.) catamorphism's response: "...men who've had sex with men aren't allowed to donate blood in the US, whereas women who've had sex with men are allowed. How they categorize trans people is anybody's guess, but one would suspect the most retrogressive way." didn't even occur to me, though I suppose it should have been obvious.*

Anyhow, so today I poked around a bit, trying to figure out what was the deal with the transgender blood donation exclusion. So far, I am not at all certain that one exists, though it seems certain that many people have been told it does.

The good news (though I haven't found more recent articles) is that apparently the Red Cross is supporting having the ban on gay male blood donors lifted:

Red Cross now seeks to allow gay blood donation

American Red Cross Fights Ban on Gays' Blood

The only thing I found that directly addresses issues around transgender blood donation is here:

Donor eligibility of a man who dresses as a woman in anticipation of sex
change surgery

This seems to be a compilation of comments from a internal discussion among people involved in organizing blood donations. Parts of it are pretty unintentionally funny : "If the donor denies sex with a man (there are trans-sexuals who do not have sex)..." (Gee, and I thought lesbians were invisible. Of course, this doesn't even compare to the complete lack of discussion of FtM folks...) Later into things a non-professional does a nice job of taking them all to task, and it does sound like the FDA at least in perfectly happy to accept legal gender as gender of record. This is a few years old, but it shows a lot about the ignorance and confusion around the issue. (Not only to FtM folk not exist, but it seems like MtF folk are more or less being equated with gay men. Which I guess I've heard is a common assumption, but... Oh, I just don't get it.)

This isn't comprehensive, I'm sure, but it seemed worth posting.

* This all is particularly annoying to me because of my own history around blood donation. Much of the reason that I am now a regular donor is that I spent years squabbling with folks at the Puget Sound Blood Center about their eligibility requirements. First I was excluded because I was bi. This was kind of fun, because it meant that when people really annoyed me I could spend time on the phone telling them that they should thank me for every time I had sex with a girl, because I wasn't having sex with a boy, and boys are dangerous. Then I was excluded because I'd had sex with bisexual men. When they finally changed that last to a twelve month exclusion, after all the fuss I'd made I felt pretty obligated to head in an donate, while continuing to bitch about the other stupid exclusions.

It turned out that it is (or at least was) pretty hard to get blood out of me. Hilarity ensued, and some years of being alternately told "perhaps you should try and serve your community some other way" and being called and begged to come in and try again because they were short.