As a surgeon Neil Hopper amputated limbs for a living. So when he had to have his own legs amputated in 2019 the tragic irony triggered an outpouring of sympathy. He was named as one of the bravest people in the UK in the BBC’s Bravest Britons of 2022 Awards. If only he’d been a drag queen he’d surely have won.
Now it turns out all this sympathy might have been misplaced. Earlier this week the aptly named Mr Hopper appeared before Cornwall Magistrates’ Court in Bodmin charged with fraud. It’s alleged he lied when he told insurers the injuries that required his legs to be amputated were due to sepsis. The police argue his injuries were self-inflicted.
This is the latest case to emerge as the result of the raid on a bizarre mutilation cult based in Finsbury Park in London. In Febuary 2022 seven men were arrested amid claims they were screening pay per view live castrations and ….amputations. At his trial in 2024, it was revealed, the cult’s ringleader Marius Gustavson had screened his own castration. He kept his penis in a drawer. As opposed to his drawers.
If he’s found guilty Hopper will be a reminder surgery has always exerted a dark sadomasochistic fascination for some people, including a small minority of surgeons. Nowhere is this more worrying than in so-called “gender affirming healthcare” where men and women elect to have…. not their limbs amputated but their genitals.
In addition to fraud Hopper is accused of encouraging Gustavson to remove body parts of third persons. As you do. If only someone at the Beeb which was so keen to celebrate the life-enhancing experience of amputation had checked the Corporation’s own archive they might have uncovered a clue to why Neil Hopper seemed so blasé about no longer possessing legs.
In 1999 I worked on a BBC Horizon called ‘Complete Obsession’ about apotemnophiles or wannabe amputees.
In his Horizon interview Robert Smith claimed he would not have done the surgery if there had been any hint of sexual fetishism. The psychiatrist who reassured Robert Smith that Hans was not …at all….motivated by sexual masochism was Britain’s leading expert on transsexuality: Russell Reid.
Reid studied under Professor John Money who set up the world’s first gender identity clinic at John Hopkins University in 1966. The clinic became the model for “sex change surgery” clinics worldwide.
Money, who popularised the notion of ‘gender identity’, considered “transsexuality” a sexual fetish or paraphilia.
The point is that Money argued apotemnophilia was rooted in an erotic masochism in which someone is sexually excited by imagining themselves having to overcome the traumatic handicaps of being wholly or partially limbless.
In the noughties, sexologist and psychologist Anne Lawrence, a hugely influential figure who is himself trans identified, agreed there were indeed strong parallels between the desire to remove limbs and the desire to remove genitals.
All this proved uncomfortable for a trans lobby which in the early 2000s felt it was on the cusp of social acceptance. Comparisons between wannabe amputees and the trans identified risked making “sex change surgery” seem even weirder than it was. Lawrence was therefore cancelled. And apotemnophile activists, who had been invited to speak at WPATH events, now found themselves beyond the pale.
It’s easy to see why the trans lobby wanted to distance itself from all this talk of sexual obsession. When Matt Walsh, in ‘What is a Woman’, suggested the two conditions of amputee-surgery and genital-surgery might be linked the leading “sex change surgeon” Marci Bowers who is himself transsexual affected ignorance. As if he had never even heard of apotemnophiles. You’d never have guessed he was trained under the surgeon Stanley Biber whose mentor was John Money.
John Money, who created the first ‘“sex change clinic”, intuited there was a profound connection between wannabe amputees and the trans identified. It is surely no accident that Marius Gustavson, the ‘Eunuch Maker’, who led a fetish cult who paid to view castrations and amputations was a leading LGBTQ+ activist in Norway before he moved to England.
It may cosplay as a social justice cause but the trans movement is morally no better and every bit as creepy as the cult led by Marius Gustavson who monetized his love of pain and mutilation.