Dr. Stanley Harold Biber

Wikipedia: Dr. Stanley Harold Biber (May 4, 1923 – January 16, 2006) was an American physician who was a pioneer in sex reassignment surgery, performing thousands (4,000-5,000) of procedures during his long career. Biber was born to a Jewish family in Des Moines, Iowa as the older of two children and the only son of a father who owned a furniture store and a mother interested in social causes. After giving up plans to become a pianist and rabbi, Biber served as a civilian employee with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, stationed in Alaska and the Northwest Territory. After the war, he returned to Iowa and enrolled in school, with plans to become a psychiatrist. Biber graduated from the University of Iowa medical school in 1948. He began performing surgery while in residency at a hospital in the Panama Canal Zone. Biber then joined the Army, where he was the chief surgeon of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) unit in the Korean War. He finished his service at what is now Fort Carson, Colorado, and in 1954 took a job at a United Mine Workers clinic in Trinidad, Colorado. Biber performed his first sex change operation in 1969 after a transsexual woman asked him if he would be willing and able to do so. At first, he did not know how, but he learned by studying diagrams from Johns Hopkins. He kept his first few surgeries secret from the Catholic nuns who operated the hospital, due to concerns that they would react negatively. Trinidad subsequently became known as the "Sex Change Capital of the World" because of his renown. Biber also trained dozens of other surgeons in gender reversal techniques and maintained a regular surgical practice of delivering babies, removing tonsils, and replacing knee and hip joints.

Title of Article Below: "Bye Bye Biber" An exit interview with Dr. Stanley Harold Biber, the man who made Trinidad, Colorado the sex change capital of the world.

Published in "THE INDEPENDANT"' by Noel Black

Rancher, competitive weightlifter, pianist, Army doctor, pioneer of transsexual surgery. For Dr. Stanley Biber, the man who made the quiet historic town of Trinidad, Colorado, the sex change capital of the world, it was all in a day's work. Since he did his first transsexual surgery in 1969 until his retirement 35 years later, Biber performed an average of three to four per week, operating on men and women who were willing to go to great lengths to have their bodies surgically altered to match their own internal gender identity. Over the course of his career, Biber has performed about 5,000 male-to-female operations and between 800 and 1,000 female-to-male operations to help people with what is known as "gender dysphoria" or "gender identity disorder" transform their bodies to match the gender they believe they were born to be. Earlier this year, Biber was abruptly forced to retire at the age of 80 because, he said, he couldn't get insurance. "It's terrible. I guess they think I'm too old," he said. "They don't say it's because of your age, but they say, 'You do not meet our criteria.' What are you gonna do?" His inability to practice most directly affects the 10,000 people of Trinidad, 130 miles south of Colorado Springs, where the majority of his practice was as a family doctor and surgeon for the community.

Dr. Stanley Biber retired from his practice early this year. Despite the impact of Biber's retirement, the town will likely retain its status as "sex change capital." Dr. Marci Bowers, a gynecologist from Seattle, recently relocated to Trinidad to take over Biber's transsexual surgery practice. "I started teaching Dr. Bowers and now she's here and now she's doing the procedure," said Biber. "They took away my insurance before I could teach her a lot of things, but the basic procedure she knows. I'm just sorry I can't help her any more now." Bowers, a transsexual herself (though not a patient of Biber's), also regretted that Biber's career came to such an abrupt end. "That was disappointing for both us for lots of reasons," she said. "One is, obviously, just his commitment to the community. But for me, he was my mentor and my inspiration. ... Even though he's here in town, it's just not the same." Bowers was particularly disappointed that she wasn't able to learn some of Biber's techniques for female-to-male surgery, but noted that she has already been able to make some improvements to the male-to-female surgery. Bowers also hopes to change some peoples' perception that transsexuals are sick people that have to be cured with surgery in order to live full lives. "What I hope people will realize is that this is not some kind of pathology or diseased brain, but that it's far more important for the world. As societies in the past have done, they've embraced this two-gendered spirit. ... Men and women see the world in very different ways, and when you see it from both genders, it's incredible." Bowers added that she thinks even those who work with the transsexual and transgender communities often still see the reality of gender as very "binary." "But I think what is changing is that gender expression can be much more fluid on a scale of 1 to 10 rather than a 1 or a 10," she said. Though Biber's career may have come to a sudden end, his legacy as a pioneer in the field of transsexual surgery has earned him a place in the history books (including the Guinness Book of World Records), in the annals of medicine and in the hearts of those patients whose lives and bodies he changed.