MSM Blood Donation Ban: (In)equality, Gay Rights and Discrimination under the Charter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Blood. It’s in you to give,” proclaims Canadian Blood Services (“CBS”), on their official website and in their advertising campaigns; that is, unless you are a man who has ever had sex with another man, even once, since 1977.1 If you are a sexually active gay or bisexual man, or a male who has ever engaged in sexual acts with another man (regardless of your sexual orientation) then you are banned for life from donating blood.2 CBS states that the reason for this ban is that men who have sex with men (“MSM”) are at a greater risk for being infected with HIV.3 The organization does not identify risky sexual behaviours that actually increase the chances of HIV infection; rather, it creates a policy that makes a sweeping generalization about a group of people (gay men) based upon a perceived characteristic of that group (engaging in non-monogamous or promiscuous sexual behaviour). In short, CBS discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation, one of the acts against which the equality provision in s. 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms4 (“Charter”) is intended to guard.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".