Meet Dr Hopper – the surgeon with an amputation fetish

The case of Neil Hopper, who last week was convicted of insurance fraud and possession of extreme pornography, is so surreal that it’s tempting to dismiss it as the kind of eccentric story that delights readers of the Fortean Times. That would be a mistake, for the case of Dr Hopper offers us an important insight into some of the more questionable claims of the trans lobby.

Forty-nine-year-old Hopper, a respected cardiovascular surgeon from Truro, amputated limbs for a living. In 2019, he had his own limbs amputated after presenting to hospital with what he claimed was sepsis. In fact, he had placed his legs in dry ice for eight hours. He then made a fraudulent insurance claim for £466,000, which was the basis of his prosecution. He has been jailed for two years and eight months for this crime, as well as possessing ‘extreme’ pornography.

Hopper didn’t harm himself to this degree purely for financial gain. It was, in fact, a longstanding desire of his to have his legs removed, with the sentencing judge describing him as having a ‘sexual interest in amputation’. He belonged to a London cult based on a website called the EunuchMaker, whose ringleader – an ‘LGBTQ+’ activist named Marius Gustavson – made hundreds of thousands of pounds from streaming pay-per-view castrations and amputations to his sadomasochistic followers. Gustavson was sentenced to 22 years in prison last year after admitting to five counts of grievous bodily harm with intent. Indeed, it was only during the Gustavson investigation that Hopper was exposed – he had been buying videos from Gustavson of men having their genitals removed.

What, you may be asking, has this to do with the trans agenda? For one thing, Hopper is a reminder that surgery has long exercised a pathological fascination on some people, including a minority of surgeons. And this is almost always driven by some form of sexual compulsion. The trans lobby has long denied that the desire for so-called ‘gender-affirming healthcare’ contains at least an element of sexual fetishism. Though why we would believe this claim from trans activists any more than we accept their other claims is beyond me.

Hopper and Gustavson are examples of apotemnophiles – people with a strong desire, usually sexual, to remove their own limbs. The trans lobby has always maintained that any link between apotemnophilia and those who seek gender surgery is superficial. But in my experience, the parallels are unignorable.

I discovered this more than 20 years ago, when I was working on a BBC Horizon documentary about apotemnophilia. I interviewed a German businessman called Hans who dreamed of having his healthy right leg amputated. He claimed this ‘need’ had haunted him since adolescence. Psychiatrists hadn’t been able to dissuade him.

When I asked Hans how he imagined life as an amputee, an excitement crept into his voice that struck me then as distinctly sexual. He’d been practising walking stiffly, he told me, as if his leg was already a prosthetic. He loved the way people looked at him.

I filmed the man for a second time in Scotland, where an NHS surgeon, Robert Smith, agreed to do the amputation. It caused a national scandal when word got out after the operation was done. No elective amputations have been performed in the UK since.

There were hints of this connection in the original Horizon documentary, which few, including me, paid much attention to at the time. For example, the psychiatrist who vouched for Hans’s mental health was Russell Reid – Britain’s top expert at the time on transsexuality. In the show, Reid directly compared the amputees to transsexuals.

Reid, as it turned out, was a disciple of Professor John Money, who in 1965 founded the world’s first gender clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Money popularised the concept of ‘gender identity’ and viewed transsexuality as a form of erotic paraphilia. Money was also the first person to coin the term apotemnophilia for those who got a sexual thrill from imagining themselves as amputees.

Money argued that the need to amputate healthy limbs was driven by similar pathological forces to those that led people to want sex-change surgery. Both, he suggested, were masochistic sexual fantasies in which people ‘performed’ their suffering for the world and for themselves. Both were, in effect, a form of humiliation enacted upon the patient at their own bidding.

The trans lobby has spent years since trying to bury any comparison between limb and genital removal. They realise that if the public was to notice the eerie parallels between the two then it would likely conclude that ‘gender-affirmation surgery’ is just fetish-driven self-harm. And they wouldn’t be far wrong.

Malcolm Clark was LGB Alliance’s head of research from 2019 to 2022. Visit his Substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.