Surgeon Neil Hopper, who wanted his legs amputated

[madnessallaround]

was watching a documentary (on Amazon i think) about this vascular surgeon in Cornwall who is currently serving out a 3 year sentence in prison. In court, when he admitted to putting his legs in dry ice for hours to force an eventual double amputation, his lawyer said he’d had body dismorphia and felt his legs/feet weren’t part of him and were unwelcome. Oh and also that he felt like and wanted to be a female from a young age.

So, one is a mental health condition, but the other is a gender identity ? How? Make it make sense.

Amputating his legs is illegal which is why he had to make it happen it himself.

Amputating his penis is not.

Make it make sense.

It doesn’t make sense. It’s brutal surgery and anyone pushing for it is seriously mentally ill and/or misinformed. Most of those in the UK opting for surgery are young people. We have allowed our children to be indoctrinated and professionals have supported this.

It is amazing how the Eunuch Maker is in jail but Jon Arcelus is high up in the NHS.

I’ve just looked that guy up; the one who backs non standard procedures like having both male and female genitalia. Wtf have I just read?

The Gender: A Wider Lens and Beyond Gender podcast episodes (with Stella O'Malley) with Malcolm Clark are both really interesting on this topic, Malcolm made a documentary in the 90s about a Scottish surgeon who was carrying out similar procedures on fetishists.

And isn't it telling that we are allowed to describe wanting your healthy arm or leg amputated a fetish but not the amputation of a healthy penis. The latter could even be a criminal offence as hate speech if you call a trans person a fetishist.

Please make it make sense!

Surgeon Neil Hopper. Nominative determinism or what?

The acceptance of fetishes by people who are too stupid to see them has broken institutions

why is he in prison? is it because of the amputation? i would say he would have been better in a mental hospital than prison with the mind set he has

https://www.cps.gov.uk/south-west/news/surgeon-jailed-fraud-after-lying-about-self-inflicted-injuries-led-his-leg

Insurance fraud.

He claimed on his disability insurance when he caused his own disability.

You could say there is nothing fundamentally better about being male or female, and both are vital for humanity, whereas a disability is going to make life more difficult/painful.
Like discrimination such as racism/sexism is people causing harm due to their prejudice, but a disabled person might be suffering even if no one around them was being ableist.

This is great.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0mjrsbj?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

Indeed.

There's huge problems, mostly for women and children, inherent in letting everyone fly their "freak flag" and expecting they be validated and celebrated as many here are only too aware.

There's been other threads about this weird man. He was in touch with the eunuch maker. Iirc he was a consumer of Gustavson's films. Some of Hopper's patients have expressed concerns about his treatment of them. One woman was in agony when he removed her varicose veins. She was clearly given insufficient anaesthetic and now thinks it was deliberate. It was a private procedure, he waived his fee following her complaint. He has a fetish about amputation and, possibly, sadism which reminds me of the adage 'if you do something you love, you never work a day in your life'.

I do feel desperately sorry for his patients, who may well both have been left feeling violated, and potentially with doubts as to whether their surgery was truly necessary, or whether he was getting his rocks off. Dreadful case.

I'm so glad someone else said that first.

I’m afraid I can’t make it make sense OP, none of us can.

In addition to Neil Hopper, there was a Scottish surgeon, Robert Smith, who removed some healthy limbs from patients in the late 90s/early 00s. He was not disciplined for it but was banned from doing any more of the procedures. He denied that his patients had fetishes, and claimed that he felt compelled to carry out the amputations for fear that the patients would otherwise seek extreme ways to remove the limbs themselves, or would choose to end their lives. But obviously we cannot have a health service that performs unnecessary operations just in case people might otherwise kill themselves.

So the NHS banned Smith from carrying out these procedures, but at the same time funds surgeries for men to have their penises turned inside out and young women to have flesh carved off their arms to create non-functioning phalluses. None of it makes sense and I’m angry that taxpayer money is used to fund ‘gender reassignment’ surgeries on vulnerable people.

I watched the documentary like 😮

whoever recommended that podcast 👏 perfect for my dog walks

There was a documentary about BIID (it probably wasn't called that then) and Robert Smith was featured in it. All of Smith's patients seem to have been thrilled following their amputations. There was also an article in the Atlantic(?), titled something like 'A New Way of Being Mad'. Both predate transgenderism but there are clear parallels.

This is the Atlantic article.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/

https://archive.ph/OsvZ6

It does actually go into the link between BIID or apotemnophilia and transsexualism.

The comparison of limb amputation to sex-reassignment surgery comes up repeatedly in discussions of apotemnophilia, among patients and among clinicians. "Transsexuals want healthy parts of their body removed in order to adjust to their idealized body image, and so I think that was the connection for me," the psychiatrist Russell Reid stated in the BBC documentary Complete Obsession. "I saw that people wanted to have their limbs off with equally as much degree of obsession and need and urgency."

Also this

In 1977 the Johns Hopkins psychologist John Money published the first modern case history of what he termed "apotemnophilia"—an attraction to the idea of being an amputee.

John Money again.

That was the documentary I saw! There's a transcript of it on the BBC but i don't know if it's watchable anywhere.

It's been a while since I read the Atlantic article. If it was written nowadays I doubt it would be published by any of the liberal publications. Remember the outcry when the Beeb did the article on the cotton ceiling.

It's always the same few names popping up.

But 'sex reassignment surgery' doesn't change your sex. A male doesn't become female after surgery (or vice versa). He becomes a male with extreme body modification. By definition someone who has medically unnecessary surgery on healthy organs or body parts which makes them reliant on additional health services or medication long-term is harming themselves and allowing themselves to be harmed by others. It's got nothing to do with whether being male or being female is fundamentally better.

Oh for pity's sake.

Knowing there is an disconnect between your gender and how others perceive that gender, is not comparable to wanting your legs removed.

Trans people are already the gender they know themselves to be. They may modify their appearance to reflect this, but many do not. Being trans is not a longing to become male/female, it's a desire for the outer to reflect the inner.

It's not a desire for pain, and it's not self-harm. Being trans is perfectly ordinary and does not disable someone.

The greatest hurdle trans people face is other people's bigotry. They're a tiny minority who just want to get on with their lives without being compared to people with body dysmorphia issues.

This guy craved something which would cause him pain and lifelong mobility issues. It consumed his life and limited it.

While being trans is only a small aspect of who someone is. It's not a hobby, passion, cosplay, psychiatric illness or fetish. It doesn't consume their lives.

Neil Hopper was/is transgender.