Going to Trinidad

Drive into Trinidad under the flat brow of Fishers Peak, red brick streets, a coal county seat of fewer than ten thousand people at the foot of Raton Pass, and nothing announces what this town became. For more than thirty years, this remote and largely Catholic coal town was known around the world as the sex change capital of the world. The man behind that was Doctor Stanley Biber.

He had been a surgeon in a mobile army hospital in the Korean War, and he came to Trinidad in nineteen fifty-four to care for the coal miners and their families. In nineteen sixty-nine, a social worker he knew, a transgender woman, asked whether he would perform her gender confirmation surgery. Biber had never done one.

He sent away for tissue-thin notes from the few surgeons who had, studied them, and told her he believed he could. He was right. Word spread, quietly at first, and then not quietly at all.

Patients came to Trinidad from every state and from overseas, so many that the phrase going to Trinidad became a kind of code inside the transgender community, a way of saying where you were headed without saying why. At his peak, Biber performed as many as five operations in a single week. By the time he stopped, in two thousand three, he had done more than three thousand.

He handed his practice to Doctor Marci Bowers, a surgeon who is herself a transgender woman. And here is the strangest part. That is only one of the improbable lives this town has led.

Trinidad sat on the Santa Fe Trail, the last rest before the long climb over Raton Pass into New Mexico. Bat Masterson, the gambler and gunfighter, pinned on a badge here and served as a town lawman in the eighteen eighties. A few miles north, at Ludlow, in the spring of nineteen fourteen, the Colorado coalfield war turned deadly, and women and children died beneath a burning tent colony in one of the darkest chapters of American labor history.

And on a rise above Main Street stands Temple Aaron, one of the oldest synagogues in Colorado, its organ once hauled across the plains by wagon. A trail town, a coal town, a gunfighter's town, a congregation's town, and for one long generation the quiet center of the world for people becoming themselves. Keep driving.

The peak stays in your mirror a good long while.