Sex-Change Doctor Stanley Biber, 82

[Christina (imported)]

Since this thread was lost, I thought it worthy of reposting.

Link to Article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 30_pf.html)

From News Services

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Stanley Biber, 82, a small-town physician who said he performed more than 4,500 sex-change operations, died Jan. 16 in Trinidad, Colo. He had been hospitalized for complications of pneumonia.

Dr. Biber, an Iowa native, graduated from the University of Iowa's medical school and served as a surgeon in a MASH unit in South Korea. He moved to Trinidad in 1954 and became the town's only general surgeon. He told the Associated Press in a 2000 interview that he performed his first sex-change operation in 1969.

He said a social worker he had met asked for the surgery, and he agreed after talking to a New York doctor who had done some sex-reassignment operations and after getting sketches from Johns Hopkins University.

At one point, he was performing 150 transsexual operations a year, Dr. Biber said.

He stopped doing surgery in 2003 after his longtime insurer left the state and he could not afford the malpractice fees of other insurance companies. He turned his practice over to Marci Bowers, a gynecological surgeon and herself a client of his sex-change surgery.