Stanley Biber

By this point in time, Biber's practice had moved to Mt. San Rafael Hospital, which had been built by the Catholic order in 1889.

Stanley H. Biber (May 4, 1923 – January 16, 2006) was an American physician who was a pioneer in sex reassignment surgery, performing thousands 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.

His parents hoped he would become a pianist or a rabbi, and he briefly considered both before World War II began.

While studying at the University of Iowa, Biber practiced weightlifting.

He tried out for the Olympic team and narrowly missed the cut.

Biber was divorced several times.

He raised nine children with the same wife on a ranch outside Trinidad.

He was survived by his wife of 11 months, Marylee Biber.

He was survived by seven children, seven stepchildren and twenty-two grandchildren, including singer Snatam Kaur by his daughter Prabhu Nam Kaur Khalsa, also a new age singer.

Stanley and Marylee married after working together for four decades; Marylee was a nurse involved with his practice.

Later in life Biber said that he didn't see himself as a religious man.

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.

He 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 during the Korean War.

He finished his service at what is now Fort Carson, Colorado.

In 1954, retiring from military service, Biber took a job at a United Mine Workers clinic in Trinidad, Colorado.

His original office was in the First National Bank building at the historic heart of the city.

Though he originally came to serve the miners, Biber sought to help the whole community and delivered babies, set broken bones, and was considered an excellent surgeon by the town.

The nuns running the hospital had just turned over ownership and control to the Trinidad Area Health Association in December 1968.

Dr. Biber kept his first few surgeries secret from the Catholic nuns who operated the hospital, due to concerns that they would react negatively.

During this period he kept his records in the hospital administrator's safe.

However, after enough procedures and secret-keeping the doctor knew he had to come clean to his bosses and the community.

So Biber, who was respected within the town as an Ob/Gyn, gathered together citizens, clergy, and town officials to explain that the people he served needed help.

Biber performed his first sex reassignment surgery in 1969 after a trans woman asked him if he would be willing and able to do so.

This woman was a friend of Biber's and a social worker whom he worked with often.

She had been living as a woman and on hormone replacement therapy under the supervision of Dr. Harry Benjamin for some time.

At first he did not know how to do this kind of operation, but he learned by studying diagrams and notes from Johns Hopkins Hospital.

He also spoke about his point of view on the matter to the local paper in 1973.

After this the attitude towards this aspect of Trinidad became generally accepting.

He also made the point that the visitors brought in business to the local economy by staying in local hotels and eating at local restaurants with their families while they received and recovered from surgery.

As another more pragmatic point he said that the profits brought in from his expensive surgeries were a key element in making Mt. San Rafael Hospital profitable.

Though, according to his wife Marylee Biber, Dr. Biber did occasionally perform surgeries off the books for people who couldn't afford it.

Trinidad was becoming known as the "Sex Change Capital of the World" because of his renown.

The nuns who worked at the hospital actually worked with Dr. Biber and cared for his trans patients as well.

“I couldn’t understand why the Sisters were looking over me while I was in the hospital and making sure transsexuals weren’t mistreated, and coming in to check on us,” recalled one of Biber's patients to the Los Angeles Times, “It never made sense to me.

But I was grateful.”

Dr. Biber began performing vaginal construction surgeries when they were fairly rudimentary and refined the procedures around a half dozen times to achieve a more natural and realistic look.