India's top court legalized same-sex sex in a landmark 2018 ruling, but the country still does not allow transgender, gay and bisexual men to donate blood.
People in the LGBT community have gone to court to challenge the decades-old ban, calling it “discriminatory.”
When Vijayanti Vasanta Mowgli's mother died from terminal Parkinson's disease, she had to receive regular blood transfusions.
But Ms Mogli, a transgender woman living in the southern city of Hyderabad, was unable to donate blood despite being the sole caregiver for her mother.
“I had to keep posting (appealing for blood donors) on WhatsApp and Facebook groups,” she said, describing the process as “traumatic.”
Mr. Mowgli was lucky enough to find a donor for his mother, but many others were not so lucky.
Veonshi Raishram, a doctor in the northeastern state of Manipur, recounted the experience of one of his patients, a transgender daughter who could not donate blood for treatment.
“My father needed two to three units of blood every day. They couldn’t find it from other sources,” she said.
“He died two days after being transferred.”
This is the story that led 55-year-old writer and activist Sharif Ragnerkar to file a petition in the Indian Supreme Court against the ban on blood donation by LGBT people.
Indian law prohibits LGBT people from donating blood because they are considered a high-risk group for HIV-AIDS. Blood donors must not have diseases that can be transmitted through blood transfusions.
The policy began in the 1980s when several countries implemented similar bans to curb the global HIV-AIDS epidemic that was killing thousands of people.
Despite the change in attitude, subsequent policies, including the latest rules drafted in 2017, have maintained the ban.
The petition, filed in July, claims the existing blood donation policy is “highly biased and presumptive” and violates the LGBT community's fundamental rights to “equality, dignity and life.”
The court ordered the federal government to respond to Ragnerka’s petition, tagging it alongside two similar court cases filed in 2021 and 2023 that are currently pending.
