Effeminate Straight Man Rejected By Blood Bank

Link.

Huh... Grow a beard, boy, before blood blanks belittle you.

...

Fuck. Damn my big-time metrosexuality.

-face palm- Really now?

It seems people are more willing to acknowledge the existance of non-camp gay people than of camp non-gay people. I can't help but wonder what the basis for this is.

The only thing that comes to mind is "if you're straight, you'll do anything to impress the ladies and that includes acting masculine" but there's several layers of presumptuousness to even that.

edited 19th Jul '11 4:34:39 AM by neoYTPism

...

Wait, there's camp straight? There's a trope that describes my love of pink, ponies and clothes?!

...

But yeah, people won't accept effeminate guys/metro guys more than masculine gays. People assumed that I was gay because "no self-respecting man would like pink and ponies and flowers" as much as I do. Apparently.

edited 19th Jul '11 4:37:07 AM by Inhopelessguy

And even if they assumed that you weren't self-respecting, the assumption that you were gay STILL wouldn't follow from it.

Yeah.

If I said that I was gay, but I loved action films, people would be like, "Meh. Okay." But now I've said "I'm straight, but I love romcoms!" people are like "dude, totes gay, man."

Grow a beard, fix that lisp, and stop sashaying; problem solved.

Beards look dumb and I prefer my love of my little pony and magical girl anime to watching shitty idiocy like football, thanks.

Telling people to stop being who they are so that they can be treated with the respect that's due to all human beings is more than a bit messed up.

I say that as someone who has a real lisp and is highly annoyed by affected ones.

Oh yeah, fuck football. Sailor Moon all the way.

edited 19th Jul '11 7:11:53 AM by Karkadinn

While I don't agree with what the blood bank allegedly did, I don't think having your blood drained and put in a freezer counts as something "due to all human beings".

He meant respect.

I don't know the exact motivations of the blood bank in this case (or whether the reporting is fair), but if it's the blood bank relying on some kind of "looks gay" heuristic to pre-filter donors and reduce the cases of rejected-because-of-STD cases they have to deal with, then it can make some sense. They are also known to reject people who have been sick recently, or who have traveled in asia or africa in the past X months, etc. My default assumption is, "they probably have a good reason", and like , I don't think being able to donate blood is some kind of fundamental human right.

So, probably, much ado about nothing.

I was about to type that.

Blood banks generally deny gay men(see part about 70's AIDS epidemic) from donating blood, he seemed gay, so they probbaly figured that he was, and thus ineligible for the process. Blood banks are a busniess, and busniess are about efficiency and making money.

Oh, so it's okay for an entire class of people to be summarily rejected because they're more LIKELY to have a disease, instead of actually trying to figure out whether they have it or not?

Blacks and Hispanics are statistically more likely than whites to have AI Ds, are you going to support rejecting them from blood banks out of hand too?

Being a business shouldn't be much a factor, I'd hope that non-profit blood banks (if they exist) also be about efficiency, i.e. saving as many lives as possible.

If that policy can be expected to save more lives on average, yes. Do you think it is a good policy to save less lives but not discriminate between blood donors?

edited 19th Jul '11 7:39:41 AM by SlightlyEvilDoctor

^^ This.

Why not, y'know, do tests to see if they actually have HIV or similar in their blood? Just throwin' that out there.

I don't know, ask them. They probably have a good reason, otherwise that's what they'd be doing.

For example, maybe when they have a contaminated sample they have to reject all other samples that were collected the same day. Maybe the cost of testing is too high, so it's worth testing when you have a 5% chance of contamination, but not when you have a 30% chance.

edited 19th Jul '11 7:42:52 AM by SlightlyEvilDoctor

They do run tests. They have to, as by this point the disease is found in people of all sexes and orientations. And they need plenty of blood; it's always in short supply. But then, if they're shooting themselves in the foot, one could argue that it's not gay people's responsibility to worry about that.

Personally, I think this is pretty dumb. He said he wasn't gay; that should have been good enough.

Because testing and screen blood sample cost time and money.

@Karkadinn: If they're gay they're gong to be rejected anyway.

The reason is that blood tests aren't perfectly reliable.

No, they aren't. I understand that it's an additional precaution, although at this point, HIV is clearly not confined to homosexual males, so it's a precaution that will become increasingly ineffectual over time.

Nevertheless, if he said he wasn't gay, it was pretty dumb to assume that he was.

"They probably have a good reason, otherwise that's what they'd be doing."

...

I'm sorry, I just thought that was a sufficiently ridiculous statement that it deserved to be dragged out in public and flogged.

Yes, when an organization has a particular policy, chances are there's a reason behind it, amazing, innit?