January 26, 2006--Gender Dysphoria

Please take a moment to read the obituary that appeared recently in the NY Times (it is linked below). It’s for Stanley Biber, who died at age 82.

Like me, I suspect you never heard of him. He was just a simple small-town doctor who practiced in Trinidad, Colorado. What then was so special about him? He was trained as a general practitioner (remember them?) after dropping out of rabbinical school. He then serviced in a MASH unit during the Korean War and after that returned home to Trinidad. For the next 15 years he had a typical rural practice--delivering babies, dealing with Strep Throats, broken bones, and outbreaks of Chicken Pox.

But then one day, in 1969, a friend came by to see him to ask if he would perform an operation on her. He relied, “Of course. What do you want to be done?”

She said, “I’m a transsexual and want you to turn me into woman.”

He thought--but aren’t you are a woman? And then asked, “What’s a transsexual?” At which time she told him that she was actually a man living as a woman and wanted an operation to turn her into a physical woman.

Now this was Trinidad, Colorado, not Greenwich Village.

So he said, "Fine. I’ll do it.”

And he did, working from a set of hand-drawn diagrams he obtained from Johns Hopkins University. The operation was a success and word began to get around. There were not that many doctors in the US at the time performing these operations on people who were experiencing gender dysphoria, the feeling of being trapped in the body of the wrong sex.

Transsexuals began to slip into Trinidad for their operations, which he duly performed. So many in fact that over the course of his life he did more than 4,000!

You may wonder how the folks in Trinidad took all this. It is after all a conservative place and to have the local motels filling up with transsexuals waiting for their operations must have strained the local culture (though it did turn out to be good for the motel and restaurant business!). Whatever the townsfolks thought about what he was doing, they decided not to impede his work. He was that respected and beloved.

His clientele was as diverse as one might imagine—there were three brothers who became three sisters. There was an 84-year-old train engineer and a 250 pound football linebacker. A cross section of America, of all of us.

Shortly before his death, in an interview with the The Rocky Mountain News, he said, “We turn out a real good product. I have one former patient, a man who became a woman and is now married to a gynecologist. Her husband doesn’t know.”

Good product indeed! Rest easy Doc.