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.
[1] 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.
[9] Biber served as a civilian employee with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, stationed in Alaska and the Northwest Territory.
[11][5] In 1954, retiring from military service, Biber took a job at a United Mine Workers clinic in Trinidad, Colorado.
[4] 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.
[13] Dr. Biber kept his first few surgeries secret from the Catholic nuns who operated the hospital, due to concerns that they would react negatively.
[13] “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.”[13] 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.
[5] When Dr. Biber began his practice on gender changing surgeries, they were so rare in number in the United States that none of it was covered by any medical insurance and there were no widely used restrictions or guidelines on who qualified for a procedure.
[9] Biber also trained dozens of other surgeons in sex reassignment surgery techniques and maintained a regular surgical practice of delivering babies, removing tonsils, and replacing knee and hip joints.
[12] In 1990 a seat on the Las Animas County Board of Commissioners was vacated due to a recall, and Biber ran to fill it.
[4] His opponent ran ads in the local paper alleging that Dr. Biber's work had made an unseemly impact on the public image of the community.
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.