Going to Trinidad: A Doctor, a Colorado Town, and Stories from an Unlikely Gender Crossroads

Summary

For more than four decades, between 1969 and 2010, the remote former mining town of Trinidad, Colorado, was the unlikely crossroads for approximately six thousand medical pilgrims who came looking for relief from the pain of gender dysphoria. The surgical skill and nonjudgmental compassion of surgeons Stanley Biber and his transgender protégé Marci Bowers not only made the phrase "going to Trinidad" a euphemism for gender confirmation surgery in the worldwide transgender community, but also turned the small outpost near the New Mexico border into what the New York Times once called "the sex-change capital of the world."

Award-winning writer Martin J. Smith spent two years researching not only the stories of Trinidad, Biber, and Bowers, but also tracking the lives of many transgender men and women who sought their services. The result is Going to Trinidad, which focuses on the complicated pre- and post-surgery lives of two Biber patients—Claudine Griggs and Walt Heyer—who experienced very different outcomes. Through them, Smith takes listeners deep into the often-mystifying world of gender, genitalia, and sexuality, and chronicles a fascinating segment of the human species that's often misunderstood by those for whom gender remains a mostly binary male-or-female equation.