THIS UC NURSING ALUMNUS IS OUT FOR
Blood and Tissue Donation Equality By: Laura Toerner
Cole Williams’ Pride and Plasma group advocates for new blood and tissue donation guidelines. Cole Williams, BSN ’23, fully embraces the advocacy side of the nursing profession.
Pride and Plasma, argued the previous guidelines were unscientific and discriminatory.
As a student, Williams co-founded Pride and Plasma, an advocacy group focused on revising restrictions that exclude many queer men, transgender women and non-binary individuals from donating blood and tissue. The group was catapulted into the national media spotlight when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed new blood donation guidelines, which were ultimately approved in May. Since then, Pride and Plasma has expanded its focus to include tissue and organ donation policies, which it says unfairly limit LGBTQ+ individuals.
“Someone needed to put pressure on the FDA to do something. Members of Congress, professional associations, advocacy groups … they would all publish a press release or send a letter to the FDA but not much more than that,” Williams says. “We needed to try something different.”
Queer men were prohibited from donating blood until 2015, when the FDA relaxed its lifetime policy on blood donations from men who have sex with men to a twelve-month deferral period. In 2020, the period was reduced to three months amid a critical blood shortage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Blood donation centers use the FDA’s guidelines to screen donors and ensure blood is safe for transfusions, but LGBTQ+ advocates, including
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Williams, who interned last summer with a U.S. House Representative and nurse, applied his knowledge of health care and government innerworkings to create Pride and Plasma’s game plan. He and other members, which included classmate Skylar Harris, BSN ’23, reached out to 70 blood centers across the country to collect testimony on how they have been impacted by the blood shortage. “We could go to the FDA and say, ‘These blood centers are hurting. Why aren’t you doing anything to help patients, providers and facilities?’” Williams says. Alongside a website with resources and a petition for the public to support the cause, Pride and Plasma drafted a 34-page argument for the
FDA. Williams was given five minutes to present during a virtual meeting of the agency’s Blood Products Advisory Committee, which convened in December 2022 for the first time in 13 months. “I was talking a mile a minute to get everything through,” Williams says. After his presentation, Williams was interviewed by national news outlets, including the Washington Post, CBS News, PBS Newshour and Insider. About a month later, the FDA announced proposed guidelines, now in place, that use gender-inclusive, individual risk-based questions to assess donor eligibility and reduce the risk of HIV transmission through transfusion. The recommendations permit donations from anyone who does not report having new or multiple partners along with engaging in anal sex the previous three months. Williams says this represents a step forward not only for queer men, but also for transgender and nonbinary persons. “No one is really talking about that, but it is a really big win for that community,” he says. By removing gendered language, transgender
