Updates & FAQ!

Hello everyone! Thank you all for making our Change.org petition signature push a success for World Blood Donor Day! Our initial goal for that day was 250 signatures and we ended up topping 4,000 that day. We are now over 11,000 thanks to you all! We've had a lot go on over the past few weeks, but we wanted to take the time to address some frequently addressed questions and concerns. 1.) We completely acknowledge that gay men (or MSM) contract higher rates of HIV/AIDS than heterosexual men. The CDC statistics make that evidently clear. It is important to know that we are not proposing a complete overhaul of these regulations. What we are proposing is to make the laws and regulations based on high-risk practices as opposed to basing it on identities. By discriminating only on sexual orientation and/or identity, there are low-risk sub sets of the gay, transgender, and womyn communities that are unable to donate and other high-risk communities that are able to donate. For example, a homosexual man who has been tested for HIV/AIDS every year for the past 20 years and has been in a monogamous relationship with his husband for the past 15 years cannot donate blood as long as the two are sexually active. A heterosexual man who has unprotected sex with three different partners of the opposite sex each week, CAN donate blood under current regulations. Many other examples like this exist, which highlight the need for change with these laws/regulations. 2.) All blood is, by law, required to be tested by the CDC for diseases before it is used on another patient. 3.) Transgender/gender non-conforming people can be (and are often) turned away from donating "with discretion" based on how they look, even if they are at a very low-risk of donation. 4.) If a man and a woman do not know each other's sexual history for the past 12 months, have protected sex, are both on PrEP, and get tested for all diseases after 3 months (which all come back negative), the man can donate blood but the woman cannot. This highlights yet another example where a low-risk community is prevented from donating blood based on gender alone. 5.) Our main goal is to increase the number of safe, low-risk donors while keeping the blood supply safe from disease and infection. Our proposal actually more aggressively targets unsafe donors than the current laws and regulations do. 6.) 10 states currently do not regulate tattoo and piercing practices. However, there are many tattoo and piercing parlors in these states that are members of the Association of Professional Piercers and Alliance of Tattoo Professionals. These two professional organizations require their members to pracice CDC-approved practices that make the risk of disease from tattoos & piercings the same (or lower) than tattoo or piercing parlours in states that do regulate it at a state level. We call for anyone who got a piercing and/or tattoo at/with these piercing/tattoo artists/parlours who have their certification with these organizations to be allowed to donate blood. 7.) While we do make an effort to get back to everyone who contacts us, we are currently inundated with messages, comments, and interview requests, so please be patient with our campaign and know that we are approaching (and may have reached) a point where we cannot get back to everyone. 8.) We encourage contrasting opinions on this page! (It helps us make our campaign stronger when it's challenged, so thank you in advance!) This is a complex issue that will only be best resolved through much debate and discussion. That being said, personally attacking one another and calling each other names will not be tolerated and will result in the deletion of comments from the page when it is seen. Be respectful of each other and act with courtesy. Again, we can't thank you all enough. We look forward to bringing you exciting updates in the near future and enacting some real change where it is needed.