IT shouldn’t be a big deal that I gave blood this week, but it is. To do it, I had to give up all forms of sex for a year. The reason: I’m gay.

With what we know today about the disease, it’s a stupid reason.

In 1985, in the early days of the AIDS crisis, the United States Food and Drug Administration recommended that men who had sex with other men be prohibited from donating blood indefinitely. This policy made sense at the time. In the decades since, the nation has made enormous progress against the virus. What was once a death sentence is now a treatable, chronic condition. And we can now detect what had been an elusive virus within seven to 28 days of infection, using nucleic acid testing.

In 2015, the agency modified the lifetime ban and allowed men who had sex with men to donate blood if they had abstained from sex for one year. This revision followed several years of study after an advisory committee found the lifetime ban “suboptimal.”

But this one-year blanket policy, which depends on the honesty of the would-be donor, still falls short by failing to consider a potential donor’s individual risk factors, an approach some other countries follow with success. As a result, this prohibition, which the American Public Health Association said “is not based in science but appears to be modeled after other countries’ choices and fears,” effectively forbids as many as two million potential donors to give blood, according to an analysis published in 2014 by the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law.