Stanley Biber

Stanley H. Biber (1923 to 2006) was an American physician and a pioneer of sex reassignment surgery. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he graduated from the University of Iowa medical school in 1948, began operating during his residency in the Panama Canal Zone and served as chief surgeon of a mobile army surgical hospital in the Korean War. In 1954 he took a post at a mine workers clinic in Trinidad, Colorado, where he worked as an obstetrician and gynecologist and general surgeon. After a first sex reassignment operation in 1969, which he learned from diagrams and notes from Johns Hopkins Hospital, his practice grew into the first private-practice transgender surgery center in the United States, and he trained other surgeons, including Marci Bowers, who took over the practice. He sat on the county board of commissioners and retired in 2003. This entry records his career, not medical advice.