(UCA News) — There is a particular kind of cruelty that arrives dressed as caution. It does not announce itself. It shows up in official language, in policy documents, and in the measured tones of government lawyers before a court. It says, “We are only trying to protect people.” And sometimes that is true.

But sometimes protection is just the polite word for something older and less defensible — the quiet, practiced decision that certain lives matter less, that certain people’s offerings are unwelcome, that some doors should stay permanently closed not because of what someone has done, but because of who they are.

India’s blood donation guidelines do exactly that. They permanently bar transgender people, men who have sex with men, and sex workers from donating blood. The justification, laid out before the Supreme Court with charts and statistics and expert testimony, is epidemiological: these groups carry higher average rates of HIV.Trending NewsLatest Series

That is factually true, and the court was right to take it seriously. But there is a question the charts cannot answer — whether a policy built on group averages can ever be honest to individuals. When you follow that question to its end, the answer is no. And that doesn’t matter, because real people are standing on the other side of it.

Begin with what blood actually is. It carries oxygen, platelets, plasma, and antigens — classified as A, B, AB, or O, with or without the Rh protein.

A surgeon receiving a unit of blood has no way of knowing the donor’s identity, because blood carries no such........

© Eurasia Review