Bloody Discrimination

Before going back to Malaysia I bought the December issue of DNA :) it was a cool issue because they had many pages of swimwear models to usher in summer in Australia. Anyway, an interesting article appeared in this issue of the magazine… and the debated gay topic is whether or not gay men should be allowed to donate blood.

Apparently in Australia, just before donating blood… you have to answer a series of personal health questions and one of them for men is “Did you have sex with a man in the past 12 months”. Well if you did, then you are not eligible to donate blood in Australia. This has sparked widespread anger within the GLBT community in Australia, particularly Tasmania… where by the GLBT community there has tried to take the case to court under the anti-discrimination law.




I cant say that I’m particularly pleased about this form of discrimination between blood donors, but also I guess I’m not as offended by it as some other gays because I personally hate needles and wont be donating blood anytime soon anyway.

In fact there is another story about me and a blood bank that infuriated me more than reading that article. You see once, sometime last year, when I was walking around campus I was approached by this man asking me to fill out a survey for the Red Cross. As usual I expressed my disinterest in the matter and tried to politely walk away, but he was quite persistent in saying that it would take less than a minute for me to fill out. So I thought to my self, I guess filling in a form wouldn’t take long… and would do much harm anyway… so I filled it in.

Well silly me I filled in some personal details as well such as my hand phone number and e-mail. You know what happened, roughly a week later, a nice lady gave me a call and said that I can just pop in anytime in the next two weeks to donate my blood at the blood bank in my suburb. I was like, ‘WTF!’. I mean I know donating blood is good and all, but I hate needles… and I don’t fancy donating my blood. I was actually quite angry at that phone call because I never agreed to donate any blood in the first place, and I calmly (tried) told her so. She replied saying that I filled in this survey form agreeing to do so. That brought be back to that shifty guy that ask me to fill out the ‘survey’ in uni. So I sort of gave her a piece of my mind saying that they cannot just ask people to fill blood donating forms in disguise of surveys. Well I guess at the same time I knew it wasn’t her fault… and it was probably just that shifty guy profiting from selling information of ‘donors’ to the blood bank. I mean seriously, I’m Malaysian and I don’t even donate blood in my own country, why would I donate blood in a foreign country. I hate needles, period.

Thinking back now, I should have just told her that I was gay and had sex in the last twelve months… hahaha that would probably have deterred her… anyway…I guess in the bigger picture it is unfair that gays cannot donate blood. I mean the reason behind it given by the Red Cross is that gay people are more prone to catching HIV and other sexually transmitted disease. This maybe true with some gays that sleep around, but isn’t this the same with straight man and women that aren’t choosy in their sex partners? Coz I know some of them that sleeps around just as much. Not allowing gay men to donate blood is really just a form of discrimination.

Hmm… the Red Cross’ explanation is that they do not discriminate homosexuals, because apparently lesbos are allowed to donate blood… only gay men aren’t allowed to do so. Erm in some ways I can understand why the GLBT community is offended… its not really the Red Cross discriminating homosexuals and not allowing them to donate blood. But rather it’s the Red Cross stereotyping gay men as sexually charged individuals that sleep around. This is most certainly not the case for most of us (definitely me) so I guess the blood donation ban does infuriate me in that sense.



Oh well, why donate blood… as a friend of mine says, the blood bank is just a sophisticated organisation run by vampires to harvest their food. And if I may say so myself, this fact seems to be strongly backed by quite a few literature, particulary the Twilight series. And I’d just like to add that Jacob is sooo fucking hawt!

Signing out.