Tech

Man Sentenced to Prison for Botched Castration In Cabin in the Woods

Bob Lee Allen met the victim on a web forum for people looking to voluntarily remove their own testicles.
​A cabin in the woods. This is a stock image, and not the exact cabin where Allen performed the castration.​ Credit: Getty Images
A cabin in the woods. This is a stock image, and not the  cabin where Allen performed the castration. Credit: Getty Images

After performing an illegal, covert castration surgery on a volunteer in the middle of the Oklahoma woods last year, an amateur surgeon was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison.

In October 2020, Bob Lee Allen and his husband, Thomas Evans Gates III, brought their patient to a cabin in southeast Oklahoma after connecting with him through the castration forum Eunuch Maker, a now-defunct forum for people seeking castration services from unlicensed castrators, or "cutters." 

The voluntary eunuch community is vast; people seek out cutters for a variety of reasons, some having to do with gender identity and others out of physical discomfort with their own balls. Due to barriers in the healthcare system where many doctors refuse to modify non-transgender patients' genitals (and even require trans patients to jump through bureaucratic hoops to access gender affirming surgery) some would-be eunuchs opt to perform the surgery on themselves, or seek out people willing to do it on others, like Allen.

Allen's patient was awake for the two-hour procedure, according to the Oklahoman, with local anesthetics only. He told investigators "after the surgery was over that Allen said that he was going to consume the parts and laughed and said that he was a cannibal," according to the affidavit—a claim which Allen denied. Investigators found body parts in a freezer in the cabin's bedroom.

The couple was caught because Allen botched the operation; the victim went to the hospital for bleeding, and Allen and his husband—who also participated in the surgery but testified against him as part of a plea agreement—tried to visit the victim there, where they were arrested. 

Allen pleaded no contest to felony counts of conspiracy to commit unlicensed surgery, practicing medicine without a license, and attempted distribution of a psychedelic mushroom.