Stanley Biber

As a physician and general surgeon in the remote southern Colorado town of Trinidad, Dr. Stanley Biber treated the usual sore throats and broken arms and did his share of delivering babies, removing appendixes and replacing hips and knees. But that's not what made Biber the most famous resident of Trinidad and put the former coal-mining town in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains on the map.

As a physician and general surgeon in the remote southern Colorado town of Trinidad, Dr. Stanley Biber treated the usual sore throats and broken arms and did his share of delivering babies, removing appendixes and replacing hips and knees. But that's not what made Biber the most famous resident of Trinidad and put the former coal-mining town in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains on the map.

Congratulations! It's not every day that you're part of something historic. "This is the first-ever televised sex-change operation in talk-show history as far as we know," Geraldo Rivera announced at the start of Monday's episode of his 4 p.m. hour on KCBS-TV Channel 2. Even more significant, this is the first-ever column about the response of a columnist's mother and mother-in-law to the first-ever oversold, overblown, overcooked, televised sex-change operation in talk-show history.

The young waitress with anxious eyes examined her four customers as she refilled their coffee and haltingly asked whether anyone wanted more tea. There was Elise, a buxom brunet in a crop top and hip-huggers. Kate, a Harvard-graduate writer in khakis, a hand-knit sweater and tasteful pearl earrings. Thea, a graphics designer sporting chic suede boots. And Jackie, a towering figure in trousers and a blazer.

Dr. Stanley Biber sent away for another surgeon's drawings the first time he changed a man into a woman. That was a quarter of a century and more than 1,000 transsexuals ago, long before Biber could boast of performing two-thirds of all the sex-change operations in the world. He does them here in a remote southern Colorado town of 9,660 people, notably distant from big cities and any major medical research institute. "It's not a peculiar place to do it," Biber says.

Margaret Lamacz, a sex researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, remembers her confusion when she began working with transsexuals at the Medical Academy in Krakow, Poland. For every male desiring to be a Christine Jorgenson, she found five females who wanted to become men. "We were always puzzled," Lamacz said. "That did not agree with the literature," which held that transsexualism was primarily a male phenomenon.