Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival 2009

For the 9,000 residents of the quiet, rural town Trinidad, Colorado, “sex change capital of the world” is just another way of saying “home.” Located on the Santa Fe Trail, where the Rockies fade into the Great Plains, this one-time mafia-run, coal mining town is an unlikely destination for more than 6,500 transsexuals who have gone there to align their bodies with their minds. In 2003, Dr. Marci Bowers left her family and thriving OB/GYN practice in Seattle to take over Dr. Stanley Biber’s genital reassignment surgery (GRS) practice in Trinidad. In 1969, years before the practice had been established in more cosmopolitan cities, Dr. Biber performed Trinidad’s first GRS. With no training in the surgery, he referred to another surgeon’s drawings for instruction, a testament to the confidence of his pioneering spirit. With an increasing number of patients awaiting GRS, Dr. Biber couldn’t keep the surgeries a secret for long in the Catholic-run hospital. At eighty years of age, with over 5,800 sex-change operations under his belt, Biber turned his practice over to Marci. Formerly Mark, Marci is the first transgender surgeon to perform GRSs. Having refined her GRS method so that it is roughly 85 percent different from Dr. Biber’s, and because of the innovations and empathy she brings to patients from having undergone the surgery herself, Marci is considered by many to be the best GRS surgeon in the world, a claim supported by her yearlong waiting list and the patient testimonies as she makes her rounds in the hospital. More generally, Trinidad explores the growing popularity of the town among the transgender community; the intersection of the recently formed transgender community with long-term residents; how the death of much revered Dr. Biber may influence the town’s acceptance of the GRS practice; and where gender dysphoria fits in terms of God’s creation.