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The Visionary Surgeon Who Put Trinidad on the Map
For decades, thousands of people came to Trinidad, Colorado, to have gender confirmation surgery done by Dr. Stanley Biber. This excerpt from
Going To Trinidad tells his and one of his patient s poignant stories.Martin J. Smith •
On December 12, 1990, a law office secretary and part-time English graduate student in Rancho Cucamonga, California, sat down to write a letter that had been nearly four decades in the making. Her name was Claudine Toni Griggs.
The diminutive Griggs had lived as a woman for 16 years, since the summer of 1974, though she’d been born and spent the first 21 years of her life as Claude Anthony Griggs. So complete had been her outward transformation from male to female that few of her friends and professional colleagues knew. At five-feet-five and 120 pounds, she says, “All I had to do to look sexually ambiguous was shave what little facial hair I had.” Plus, for 17 years she’d been takin