Do sperm banks take gay/bi donors?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Even if one lied how would the sperm bank tell by looking at the sperm?

The concern for the sperm bank in terms of liability is the elevated chance of gay donors having HIV (even if this isn't true/is a faulty assumption), not that the offspring would turn out gay. Similar to banning gay men from donating blood - antiquated, but yeah, still very much a thing.

Understand the unfounded rationale, but wouldn't there be a much more objective way of screening for HIV, i.e., a simple blood test rather than a questionnaire?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No, they will not unless you are using the person as a known donor. My wife and I are a same sex couple and our gay friend is also the donor for our children. We worked with Fairfax Cryobank, and there were a lot of hoops he had to jump through and red tape we had to deal with. Specifically, he had to go through STD testing when he first started donating, then his sperm had to sit in quarantine for six months and he was tested again. Once the tests all came back clear, we could use the sperm. It became quite expensive, but this donor was our pick for many reasons and I'm glad we chose the path we did.

When I was looking into this, it was my understanding that the banks do extensive testing and quarantine for any known donor (gay or not) that is not the spouse/partner. Sexual orientation wasn't the issue, but the fact that the source was external to the relationship.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Even if one lied how would the sperm bank tell by looking at the sperm?

The concern for the sperm bank in terms of liability is the elevated chance of gay donors having HIV (even if this isn't true/is a faulty assumption), not that the offspring would turn out gay. Similar to banning gay men from donating blood - antiquated, but yeah, still very much a thing.

Understand the unfounded rationale, but wouldn't there be a much more objective way of screening for HIV, i.e., a simple blood test rather than a questionnaire?

My understanding is that HIV takes a while (6+ months?) before it sometimes shows up in blood tests. That's why people exposed at work (in a medical capacity, for example) need to be retested at 6 months. In any case, I personally wouldn't choose to accept bodily fluids from someone engaging in high risk sexual activity, and there's a correlation between bisexuality/homosexuality in men and high risk sexual activity, so I think it's a fair question.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't know but I read the being gay comes through the mother's genes anyway, if that's the issue.

That sounds fake. No one knows how people become gay or even if it is genetic versus environmental

I'm not a scientist. That's just something I heard.


https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/14/genes-influence-male-sexual-orientation-study

"The work has yet to be published, but confirms the findings of a smaller study that sparked widespread controversy in 1993, when Dean Hamer, a scientist at the US National Cancer Institute, investigated the family histories of more than 100 gay men and found homosexuality tended to be inherited. More than 10% of brothers of gay men were gay themselves, compared to around 3% of the general population. Uncles and male cousins on the mother's side had a greater than average chance of being gay, too."

Here's another one:

https://www.livescience.com/7056-mom-genetics-produce-gay-sons.html

If there's a maternal link, I think it's just as likely to be related to abnormal gut flora (which almost every woman has these days due to the unnatural way we live) than genetics per se. I don't know enough about epigenetics, but I heard that they're heavily influenced by many factors including gut flora.

[Anonymous]

My understanding is that all sperm banks keep new donations quarantined for 6 months and then retest for HIV regardless of sexuality/sexual history of the donor. This is also true of known donors. Of course if you are choosing a donor and don’t want a bi or gay donor that is your choice and presumably why the question is asked/provides to recipients, but my impression is that it has no effective of the chance of STDs since the respectable banks are very, very careful about that and don’t just take self-reported behaviours as fact.

I actually was grateful for being able to determine some of this information because I had a slight predisposition to having a queer donor myself — it is always interesting what factors matter to different people, especially seeing the PP poster who is less comfortable with it!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Even if one lied how would the sperm bank tell by looking at the sperm?

The concern for the sperm bank in terms of liability is the elevated chance of gay donors having HIV (even if this isn't true/is a faulty assumption), not that the offspring would turn out gay. Similar to banning gay men from donating blood - antiquated, but yeah, still very much a thing.

So ridiculous. Every sperm donor is tested for HIV anyway!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just curious. I noticed while looking through the websites that for those that have a section with a question about sexual orientation, 100% put straight. Are they purposely filtering out any gay/bi men?

All I know is my friend donated and said there was no gay porn in the room... straight only

[Anonymous]

Aids

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just curious. I noticed while looking through the websites that for those that have a section with a question about sexual orientation, 100% put straight. Are they purposely filtering out any gay/bi men?

All I know is my friend donated and said there was no gay porn in the room... straight only

That was exactly the question that came to my mind.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't know but I read the being gay comes through the mother's genes anyway, if that's the issue.

That sounds fake. No one knows how people become gay or even if it is genetic versus environmental

I'm not a scientist. That's just something I heard.


https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/14/genes-influence-male-sexual-orientation-study

"The work has yet to be published, but confirms the findings of a smaller study that sparked widespread controversy in 1993, when Dean Hamer, a scientist at the US National Cancer Institute, investigated the family histories of more than 100 gay men and found homosexuality tended to be inherited. More than 10% of brothers of gay men were gay themselves, compared to around 3% of the general population. Uncles and male cousins on the mother's side had a greater than average chance of being gay, too."

Here's another one:

https://www.livescience.com/7056-mom-genetics-produce-gay-sons.html

If there's a maternal link, I think it's just as likely to be related to abnormal gut flora (which almost every woman has these days due to the unnatural way we live) than genetics per se. I don't know enough about epigenetics, but I heard that they're heavily influenced by many factors including gut flora.

I worked as a research assistant on this study while attending Northwestern. The study was not completed at the time when I left school, so I do not know the result, nor if anything conclusive was discovered. My understanding of the research was that there was evidence that there is a genetic component to sexual orientation and that women produce a particular hormone with the birth of each male child that increases the likelihood of subsequent male children birthed by that woman being homosexual. The study focused on gay brothers for that reason. Though there was talk of looking at lesbians as well in the future. Again, nothing conclusive was published stating that it was linked to the mother; however, that was one of the theories being investigated based on my understanding of the research.

[Anonymous]

The FDA doesn’t allow men who’ve had sex with other men within the past five years to be unknown sperm donors. We ran into this with our known donor — for known donors, the recipients can just sign a waiver saying we accept that the sperm doesn’t meet FDA requirements. But I don’t think you can do this for anonymous donations. I don’t know how The Sperm Bank of California gets around. It’s frustrating. We had to switch to a sperm bank donor for unrelated reasons, and we would much rather choose a queer donor if we could. (It’s a little scary to think there’s some possibility that an unknown donor could turn out to be homophobic if our kiddo contacted him at 18, though presumably most guys realize that lesbians are a big market for sperm donation.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The FDA doesn’t allow men who’ve had sex with other men within the past five years to be unknown sperm donors. We ran into this with our known donor — for known donors, the recipients can just sign a waiver saying we accept that the sperm doesn’t meet FDA requirements. But I don’t think you can do this for anonymous donations. I don’t know how The Sperm Bank of California gets around. It’s frustrating. We had to switch to a sperm bank donor for unrelated reasons, and we would much rather choose a queer donor if we could. (It’s a little scary to think there’s some possibility that an unknown donor could turn out to be homophobic if our kiddo contacted him at 18, though presumably most guys realize that lesbians are a big market for sperm donation.)

So disappointing. One of the main reasons we went with a friend instead of giving money to these terrible banks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't know but I read the being gay comes through the mother's genes anyway, if that's the issue.

That sounds fake. No one knows how people become gay or even if it is genetic versus environmental

I'm not a scientist. That's just something I heard.


https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/14/genes-influence-male-sexual-orientation-study

"The work has yet to be published, but confirms the findings of a smaller study that sparked widespread controversy in 1993, when Dean Hamer, a scientist at the US National Cancer Institute, investigated the family histories of more than 100 gay men and found homosexuality tended to be inherited. More than 10% of brothers of gay men were gay themselves, compared to around 3% of the general population. Uncles and male cousins on the mother's side had a greater than average chance of being gay, too."

Good Lord did you even read the article?: it even says "The flawed thinking behind a genetic test for sexual orientation is clear from studies of twins, which show that the identical twin of a gay man, who carries an exact replica of his brother's DNA, is more likely to be straight than gay. That means even a perfect genetic test that picked up every gene linked to sexual orientation would still be less effective than flipping a coin."

Learn to read respected sources and discern

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The FDA doesn’t allow men who’ve had sex with other men within the past five years to be unknown sperm donors. We ran into this with our known donor — for known donors, the recipients can just sign a waiver saying we accept that the sperm doesn’t meet FDA requirements. But I don’t think you can do this for anonymous donations. I don’t know how The Sperm Bank of California gets around. It’s frustrating. We had to switch to a sperm bank donor for unrelated reasons, and we would much rather choose a queer donor if we could. (It’s a little scary to think there’s some possibility that an unknown donor could turn out to be homophobic if our kiddo contacted him at 18, though presumably most guys realize that lesbians are a big market for sperm donation.)

Is there a citation for this? My understanding was that it was just NY state that refused queer donors.

[Anonymous]

This article describes the FDA ban: https://www.google.com/amp/s/melmagazine.com/en-us/story/sperm-inequality/amp. I did look it up in the federal register a while back to confirm it, but didn’t save the cite.