Sex, Medical Ethics and Questionable Allies
A wide-ranging conversation with Daemen University assistant professor Kurt Blankschaen.
Here at Yes, Misstrix, I often have the pleasure of speaking with amazing people doing fascinating work in the realm of sex, sensuality, sexuality and desire. This week, I’m sharing a three-part interview with Kurt Blankschaen, an assistant professor at Daemen University who teaches (among other things) a course called Sex, Love and God. Kurt and I go way back to our days at Mentor High School, so he knew me before I became the deviant behind this sex-focused newsletter. But we’ll skip right over that detail and get to part one of our interview…
Yes, Misstrix: Let’s kick things off by having you tell the readers who you are and how you got into this line of work. How does one go about being asked to teach a class called Sex, Love and God?
Kurt Blankschaen: When I was an undergrad, I originally wanted to work for the state department. So, I started taking a bunch of languages, history and political science courses, and things like that. I also started taking philosophy classes early on, and I got a lot of encouragement to keep taking more. I really liked philosophy because it helped me make sense of my own inside things—things that I was really frustrated or angry or puzzled by but I couldn't quite find the vocabulary to talk about.
Now, a lot of it wasn't immediately useful. Reading Descartes wasn't exactly the most applicable way forward, but the training kind of gave me a more precise way separate what was ‘the experience’ and what was actually frustrating about it. For me, a large part of this was making sense of what it meant to be gay. And then also, what did it mean to be gay and Catholic? And how did I put those two parts of myself together? Because there were unhelpful suggestions that amounted to stop being one or the other. But that wasn't really a viable option.
I took a circuitous route through graduate across the country, eventually ending up in Boston. Throughout the entire time, I was wondering what made the gay community special as a group. So, why do people collect along this one attribute rather than the 10,000 other attributes they have? What makes this attribute something that's politically or morally important? That's what I ended up writing a lot of my dissertation on. Then, along the way, I get interested in these medical ethics questions about how does sex, from a medical point of view, become relevant as a public health policy, specifically around concerns about HIV/AIDS and blood donation?
Then, I was fortunate enough to get a job at Daemen University. I started teaching medical ethics and really started exploring those same kinds of questions about what does the government have a responsibility to do in terms of health care? How do ordinary interactions or form questions create barriers to people? For example, insurance questions like asking for like husband and wife rather than just asking for spouse or even asking questions about biological sex. So, if you ask about sex and then put the F/M checkbox on the form, what information does that give? What does that also conceal? How does the way you ask questions about what name to be called impact interactions about who can be pregnant?
For instance, there's an article that was just in the New England Journal of Medicine about a trans man, who everyone treated respectfully, but no one knew he was pregnant, and he ended up miscarrying. There was no villain in the story. It was just the way that we set up the system wasn't meant to accommodate him, so questions like that are the ones I’m most interested in. With respect to the class Sex, Love and God, I actually ended up inheriting it from one of my colleagues who left, but it was perfect because it kind of drew all of my interests together. I had a lot of fun teaching it.
YM: One part of being an assistant professor is teaching, but the other part involves doing research and publishing papers. How do you go about determining the types of topics you’re interested in exploring for these projects?
KB: For my research, one of the things I think I try to focus on first is, ‘What's a practical question to answer?’ I start by working backwards. If I were to pick a stranger to talk to about this topic—maybe someone in the grocery store line—and ask them what they think, they would probably at least have an opinion about it.
Those are the kinds of questions that always interested me. So, the blood donation papers I started with were written when my now-husband and I were engaged. At the time, the FDA had just revised its policy. Before, men who have sex with men were indefinitely deferred from donating blood because there were these holdover concerns about HIV/AIDS in the ’80s.
Those concerns gradually started to recede in the ’90s, but the FDA is conservative, not from a political viewpoint but just from the perspective that if you're the one making the policy, you have to be the one who's responsible for it. My first paper was asking, ‘What should the policy be given that what we know about HIV has significantly advanced?’ Now, we have faster tests, and we've also disabused the idea that it's not only gay or bisexual men who have HIV. Because we know it’s a human problem.
Then, the second paper I published was on whether or not men who have sex with men who know that they're HIV-negative are morally permitted to lie on the questionnaire for blood donation. The paper worked through the questions of, ‘When would you be entitled to know that your blood is safe?’ and ‘When does that knowledge contradict what the policies actually screening for?’
For that, I looked at a real-world case, where Kyle Freeman, a Canadian man, did lie about being sexually active, in order to donate blood. Unfortunately, even though he was HIV-negative, he had syphilis and was fined 10,000 Canadian dollars for mispresenting his sexual status. That's a pretty steep risk. I was looking at, ‘Is it morally permitted for someone to take on that risk?’ Because there are some significant costs for doing so.
YM: A lot of your research work has been medically motivated, but you've also published on the topic of LGTBQ allies and the responsibilities of allies. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that came about?
KB: When I was an undergrad, I had this very strong commitment to the idea that somehow the gay community was this pure community and only we could help ourselves. It was fairly separatist. Then, the more I thought about it and the more time went on, the more I realized how a lot of straight allies were really crucial in getting me through some of the harder parts of my life.
Now, they probably wouldn't describe themselves as straight allies. They would probably describe themselves as being a good family member or good friend, but that started to change the way I thought about what relationships were valuable, not just for me personally, but also for the gay community and larger LGTBQ community.
The other part that got me thinking about it was the people who would say, ‘I'm an ally’ and they would have a sticker or something like ‘Love Is Love’ on their Facebook page or whatever. But when I actually asked, ‘Oh, what are you doing to be an ally?’ They really wouldn't offer a lot of concrete examples. So, I started thinking about was well, you say you're an ally, and you seem pretty defensive if I ask what you’re doing about that, so it's obviously something you're invested in, but I wanted to kind of spell out the conceptual terrain of why this is so important to people, especially if they’re not able to point to concrete examples like, ‘This is how I help trans students ‘ or ‘When a gay colleague was subject to homophobia, this is what I did.’
I ended up co-authoring the second paper with a former student of mine at Boston University. This paper was looking more at those kinds of basic questions. So, if you can't identify a flesh-and-blood person who you’re allied to, someone who you're really making this difference for and not making it about you, what have you done to really help this person?
Then they might be a questionable ally. Why can't you identify someone you’ve helped? You don’t even necessarily need to have these personal relationships. You could be a big donor and donate to the community. But, if you can't point to these specific relationships of these specific ways you're helping, maybe the idea of being an ally lies more in your head than in your actions.
With pleasure,
Yes, Misstrix
P.S. I hope you’re enjoying Kurt’s wisdom! As you might have guessed from this portion of the interview, our conversation was quite extensive. Instead of sharing it across two weeks, I will be sending out parts two and three on Wednesday and Friday, respectively. Thanks for reading!