Stanley H. Biber

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.

Early life 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.

Personal life While studying at the University of Iowa, Biber practiced weightlifting. He tried out for the Olympic team and narrowly missed the cut. 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.

Career Military service 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 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. after a trans woman asked him if he would be willing and able to do so. The nuns running the hospital had just turned over ownership and control to the Trinidad Area Health Association in December 1968. 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. In 1985 Biber reported that transexual surgeries accounted for about 20% of his total work. Bowers said, shortly afterwards, that she never expected to "fill his shoes".

Related media On March 9, 2005, the television show South Park first aired the episode "Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina". In the opening scene, school-teacher Mr. Garrison believes that he is a woman on the inside, and decides to undergo a gender change surgery, which is performed by a "Dr. Biber" of the Trinidad Medical Center.

The documentary film Trinidad (2008) is about the town of Trinidad and its reputation as the "sex change capital of the world". Dr. Biber is mentioned often in the film, as is his protegée Dr. Bowers. The documentary-style reality series Sex Change Hospital (2007) gives a glimpse of Bowers's practice after Biber's retirement.

Journalist Martin J. Smith published a biography of Dr. Biber and Trinidad called Going to Trinidad: A Doctor, a Colorado Town, and Stories from an Unlikely Gender Crossroads in April 2021.