A man accused of carrying out castrations on other men and streaming the footage on his “eunuch maker” website has appeared in court. Marius Gustavson, 45, along with eight others, is alleged to have performed extreme body modifications – including the removal of penises and testicles.
The procedures were filmed and uploaded to the eunuch maker website he ran and subscribers would pay to watch, Westminster Magistrates’ Court heard on Wednesday. Gustavson, who is originally from Norway, is said to have been the ringleader in a wide-ranging conspiracy involving up to 29 offences of extreme body modifications, the removal of body parts, the trade in body parts, and the uploading of videos. The Metropolitan Police said the charges relate to 13 alleged victims.
Raids were carried out in London, Scotland, and south Wales on Wednesday morning and a total of nine men later appeared in courts in central London and Wales over the alleged six-year plot, which is said to have brought in some £200,000 in income. Gustavson, from Tottenham, north London, is charged with conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm with intent between January 1, 2016, and January 1 last year and five counts of causing GBH to five alleged victims. The GBH charges include the removal of a man’s penis, the clamping of another’s testicles, and freezing of a leg which required amputation.
He is further charged with acquiring or possessing criminal property, making an indecent image of a child, and distributing an indecent image of a child. The court heard Gustavson, who appeared in the dock in a wheelchair, has had his own leg, penis, and nipple removed.
He appeared alongside Peter Wates, 65, from Croydon, in south London, who is charged with conspiracy to cause GBH with intent. Wates is alleged to have been involved with nine of the 29 incidents while Romanian national Ion Ciucur, 28, who works in a hotel in Gretna Green, Scotland, is said to have been involved in two. Ciucur, who appeared separately, faces the same count of conspiracy to cause GBH and all three men were remanded in custody ahead of their next appearance at the Old Bailey on April 19.
Three other men – David Carruthers, 60, Janus Atkin, 37, and Ashley Williams, 31 – who are all from Newport, south Wales, appeared at Newport Magistrates’ Court, charged with being involved in the same conspiracy. They were granted bail and will appear at the Old Bailey on the same date for a plea hearing.
Nathan Arnold, 47, from South Kensington, west London, Damien Byrnes, 35, from Tottenham, north London, and Jacob Crimi-Appleby, 22, from Epsom, Surrey, also appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday each charged with a single offence of causing GBH with intent. Arnold is alleged to have removed Gustavson’s nipple, Byrnes is accused of removing his penis, and Crimi-Appleby is accused of freezing his leg requiring amputation. They were each granted bail and will also appear at the Old Bailey with their co-defendants next month. None of them have entered pleas to any of the charges.
The group is said to have been part of a society in which people willingly undergo extreme body modification. The practice is linked to a subculture where men become “nullos” – short for genital nullification – by having their penis and testicles removed. The Met said in a statement: “We encourage anyone who has had similar experiences to seek medical advice from their local sexual health clinic or GP.”
In 2021 an article said No one has, to The Daily Beast’s knowledge, seriously studied cutters, or people’s willingness to seek them out and cover for them despite mishaps and horror stories. However, according to several experts on gender diversity and surgeries, and to a handful of people who have pursued the kind of services cutters offer, whom The Daily Beast consulted for this article, cutters’ operations do not reflect some kind of collective pathology. Nor do they merit tabloid melodrama or major legal crackdowns. Instead, they are largely the result of society’s failure to fully acknowledge, truly respect, and adequately serve deeply marginalized gender identities.
Thanks to a rising—if piecemeal and still woefully insufficient—tide of awareness, most people today know at least the basics about binary transgender identities (i.e., male-to-female and female-to-male) and the surgeries that many, though not all, binary trans people pursue as part of their transitions. But most talk about gender still treats it solely as a binary, male or female, and involves cut-and-dry ideas about the physical traits associated with each of those labels. Even among medical experts, awareness of non-binary identities, which sit between, blend, or move beyond conceptions of male and female gender, remains low. There is also little awareness of people who still identify wholly with the gender they were assigned at birth, male or female, but for any number of reasons feel a deep need to remove some or all of their physical sex traits for a range of reasons including body integrity dysphoria; a profound discomfort with the sexual side of their being; or pure, intangible personal preference.
People’s own diverse and often idiosyncratic experiences and conceptualizations of gender can lead them to pursue surgeries that go far beyond the “traditional,” gender binary trans trajectories we most often see in the media today. Many, like William, want what they refer to as nulloplasty, a series of surgeries that will leave them with no sex traits whatsoever—and sometimes no nipples as well. Some people born with penises and testicles want to keep the former, but lose the latter—though some choose to keep their empty scrotums. (There is a dedicated Reddit forum for the latter group to share photos of their genitals: Empty Sacks, “for those who had the balls to give theirs up.”) Others want to keep the genitalia they were born with and add new genitalia on top.
In line with their diverse gender identities and surgical desires, and ever-evolving gender vocabulary, there is no set or singular term, or set of pronouns, for these individuals—not even an umbrella term. Some identify as non-binary trans people, or as gender non-conforming trans men or women. Others identify as non-binary but not trans. A fair number still consider themselves cis binary men or women even after having all of their genitalia removed. A few talk about their surgeries as purely cosmetic body modifications, unrelated to their gender identities—like tattoos or piercings, albeit more extreme. Even two people pursuing the same surgeries for the same broad reasons may use different self-identifiers and pronouns.
“Surgery on genitalia has been done for thousands of years,” Loren Schechter, a leading gender confirmation surgeon based just outside of Chicago, told The Daily Beast, whether for medical or ritual reasons or as part of other cultures’ recognition of gender identities and experiences that are not part of the modern, Western mainstream. So, doctors know how to safely perform many of the procedures that gender diverse individuals seek.
