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28 February 2014

Victoria Fenández (1932–) performer

Victor Fernández was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico. His father persistently denied that such an effeminate child could be his.

Victor moved to New York soon after high school, where she became Vicky Starr and a performer.

In the 1960s she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and started female hormones with great success. She was able to work in a bar in North Beach as the district's first topless dancer. Conforming to the conventions of the time, she ended the act be taking the microphone and in a baritone: "I've got a secret. I'm a man!".

After surgical completion and several husbands, Victoria remained active in the Latina gay/LGBT/queer community. In the late 1990s she participated in the community oral history project.

She also amassed a personal archive documenting her life in the city, including her performances as “Mr. Vicki Starr,” friendships with fellow transgender women, and sex work. With funding from Center for Chicano Studies Horacio Roque Ramírez & Rolando Longoria have been digitizing her collection.
  • "Vicki Starr". Drag Queen, 1, Neptune Production, 1970: 34-9.
  • Laurence Senelick. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. Gender in performance. Routledge, 2000: 396
  • Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 201.
  • Horacio N. Roque Ramírez & Rolando Longoria II. "Digitizing Desires: Virtual Public Memory, LGBT Latino Histories, and the Vicki Starr Collection" UC Santa Barbara, Center for Chicano Studies Newsletter, X, 1, Spring 2007: 3. www.research.ucsb.edu/ccs/CSI%20News07.pdfNO LONGER AVILABLE
  • Horacio N. Roque Ramírez. "Queer Immigrant Sexual Crossings to San Francisco: The Lives and Labors of Puerto Rican Performer Vicki Starr". GLBT Historical Society: Talking Back: Queer History Fully Exposed, 2009. www.facebook.com/events/205745065780.  NO LONGER AVILABLE
  • Horacio Roque Ramírez. "Archives of Sexual Crossings: The Meanings of Puerto Rican Topless Transgender Performer Vicki Starr". American Historical Association, January 3, 2014. https://aha.confex.com/aha/2014/webprogram/Paper14140.html.

25 February 2014

Ramon Te Wake (1976 - ) musician, broadcaster.

Te Wake, a Māori, was raised in Ascot Park outside Wellington. She moved to Wellington in the early 1990s and then to Auckland.

She toured New Zealand in the R&B/Funk band Pure Funk in 1995-6. She released an EP in 2002, and from 2004 became a presenter on Takatāpui, Māori Television’s first GLBT show.

In 2005 she was a co-host at Pasifika, the world's largest Polynesian culture festival. In 2011, for Takatāpui she covered the death of activist Carmen Rupe.

The same year she directed a 25-minute video Pacific Voices for the New Zealand AIDS Foundation, and a series on Maori TV I Know A Sheila Like That, featuring Maori women.
EN.WIKIPEDIA     Linkedin  MySpace

 

22 February 2014

Wu Mingen 吳明恩 (1962 - ) infomercials moderator, auctioneer.

Wu's father was Wu Zheng Yan, a mayor in Qingshui District 清水區, Taichung City, Taiwan. Wu was educated at the National Shimizu High School and then in 1981 Wu consulted with Dr Zhang Qizhong who sent her to Singapore for surgery with Professor SS Ratnam, as the operation was then still illegal in Taiwan. This with her father's consent. She took the name Wu Mingen.

Mingen attended the Methodist-founded Soochow University, where she passed well, but ran into problems in that the university's paperwork said that she was a man.

She adopted the professional name of Li Jing, and after working as a singer, a model and actress in a soap opera, she became an infomercials moderator. She became a star on Eastern Media Group's Shopping Channel 東森購物.

In 2002 she married a man 14 years her junior.

In her 2004 autobiography Li Jing wrote that she had been born a hermaphrodite, and had had surgical correction.

Li Jing hosts numerous popular television shows and is known as the "Queen of Auction" in Taiwan's Eastern TV Auction Channel.  She is the top auctioneer and star of the channel and holds multiple sales records, such as selling 380 one-carat diamonds in 80 minutes, 700 computer notebooks in 85 minutes and bringing in 200 million Taiwan dollars worth of sales in just one hour.

In 2009 Dr Zhang Qizhong wrote an article in a Taiwanese medical journal to share his experiences in 35 years as a doctor. He wrote about how in 1981 he had arranged a sex change for a 23XY male, and at the end of the article revealed that he was talking about Li Jing. This was picked up by the regular press. He was criticized for revealing the name of a patient, but defended himself in that Li Jing had discussed her operation in her autobiography.

Li Jing was featured in the 2012 movie Drug War 毒戰 which was filmed in China.
  ZH.WIKIPEDIA

19 February 2014

Tobi Marsh (1938 – 2012) performer

John Dale Harvey was raised in Greeneville, Tennessee until age 12 when his family moved to Cincinnati.

As a teenager he started working as a amateur female impersonator, and at 19 was a member of the Jewel Box Review - where he took the name Tobi Marsh. He joined just after Dorian Wayne left creating a vacancy. In the early 1960s he was engaged at Club 82 where Tony Midnite was doing the costumes.

Tobi's lover was the 6'5" (1.96m) Yale-educated lawyer Sandy. Sandy liked to say that he was five foot 17 inches. He was a regular in Virginia Prince's FPE organization in New York, where he rarely wore female clothing, but did show photographs of himself so dressed.  He was also part of the local bondage community.

Tobi had a part in the 1971 film, The Love Thrill Murders/Sweet Savior with Troy Donahue, as a hair-dresser in drag who is killed. He was also in Devil in High Heels, Grand Illusion, The Bedroom Window 1987.

Tobi did an European tour appearing at Chez Nous in Berlin (where his landlord subjected him to homophobic abuse), Madame Arthur's and Le Carrousel in Paris, but came home disillusioned:
"The local entertainers were resentful of Americans working in their countries. The standard of living was below par for an American. I cancelled my contract and came home."
Tobi retired age 55. John Harvey died aged 74 from complications after a car accident.

Queer Music Heritage    De Alba    IMDB

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One presumes that Prince was not informed about Sandy.   While male lovers of trans women are mainly straight, in the 1960s Sandy would have been taken as gay for having Tobi as a lover.  And into bondage too!

16 February 2014

Fran Bennett (1954–) celebrity DJ

Frank grew up in an 11th-floor apartment in Manhattan, his father the songwriter, Johnny Lehman, his mother the 1940s hit singer Evelyn Knight. At age 11 he was tagging along with his elder brother, Andrew Knight, to Greenwich Village to listen to Beat poets and Joan Baez. By puberty he had long hair and was wearing bell bottoms and satin shirts.

His parents moved to Phoenix hoping that the move would keep him in school. At 14 he learned about transsexuals and left a copy of Christine Jorgensen's autobiography on the family coffee table. Even that did not generate the required conversation.

His brother Andrew (1940 – 1989) became a tour lighting technician who worked with the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd.

Frank, using the surname Bennett, developed two personae: a suave hipster, successful with women; and April, her inner self who was kept private and only rarely let out.

The hipster went on to become Uncle Frank, an FM radio disk jockey first in Phoenix, and then Los Angeles and San Jose. Many women offered themselves, but none were allowed close enough to learn his secrets, although one relationship did result in a daughter, Saira. At 18 Frank was smoking hash with Muddy Waters in Aspen; at 24 he was a celebrity DJ with his name in lights on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip. He interviewed everyone from The Allman Brothers to Frank Zappa. His peak was as one of the stars on KOME radio in San Jose, when it won the Rolling Stone Readers Poll as Station of the Year for both 1988 and 1990, its DJs were on the cover of the music magazine.

He was also cross-dressing on the sly. April would visit Sacramento at the weekends, trying to pass. "It was peaceful. I felt like me. I wanted it to be this way all the time. It was depressing to go back."

Frank drank to excess, and one time in 1991 was too drunk to go on the air. Therapy was suggested and he started seeing Mildred Brown in Los Gatos. Brown, a clinical psychologist who – it so happened – specialized in working with transsexuals:
"I had a complete wreck walk in here," Brown said. "He must have been 300 pounds then, addicted to everything. His denial was intense. He wanted to just pretend he was something else, just a cross-dresser, maybe, something that wouldn't turn his life upside down. I looked at 'Uncle Frank' back then, and it was a role of a lifetime. If we gave Academy Awards for role playing, this was it. It would take 10 years to finally admit to her true self."
Despite being top-rated, Bennett was laid off in 1993 after Infinity Broadcasting acquired the station, and was replaced by syndicated programming such as the Howard Stern Show. He took a gig working in Saipan, in the US territory of the Northern Mariana Islands. This struck him as the time to start taking female hormones, and he found a US doctor on the island who wrote a prescription.

In April 1995 KFOX in San Jose phoned with a job offer. This led to meeting Erika, the 400 lb (181 kg) morning co-host on the station. She was in the middle of a divorce and they were both looking for new accommodation. At first for financial reasons, they rented together. They had a similar sense of humor and a shared love of Scrabble. By Christmas 1996 they were lovers. Finally Bennett told Erika about his April persona and showed a photograph. Her reaction was:
"OK, then, let's go shopping."
Erika nurtured April, and April nursed Erika through six weeks of convalescence after gastric bypass surgery. Despite Erika's encouragement, it was not until summer 1999 that Bennett told his bosses of his desire to be a woman:
"They said there are some factions out there who love their Lynyrd Skynyrd and don't want to hear about transsexuals. I couldn't figure out at that point how to live dual lives. So I stayed Frank and kept the secret."
That fall, Bennett had a nose job, but fearing exposure stopped taking hormones and electrolysis, and became severely depressed.
Erika: "Those few months were so dark.  I almost took my leave. I felt like the wizard behind the curtain, saying, 'Do it, now. Being a woman obviously makes you so much happier.' But she was paralyzed with fear."
Helped by heavy sessions with Mildred Brown, Bennett resumed taking female hormones in summer 2000. By then Bennett was wearing some female clothes in the studio, but was still the deep-voiced Uncle Frank on the air. In late August Bennett took a week off, and the station's general manager explained to the staff what was happening. On her return the other staff greeted Fran with a dozen roses and three signed cards. Her mother, Evelyn Knight was supportive as was her daughter Saira, and Erika's son. Fran was still Uncle Frank on the air, but was able to give up smoking and drinking. Her program director commented:
"Frank was wound pretty tight, and Fran was not. This was someone I've known for 20 years as a guy, so that took some getting used to. But the great thing was, Fran didn't have the issues Frank had. She was a much happier person."
Fran and Erika were married in September, and Saira was bridesmaid to both brides. Erika had problems in that people now took her to be gay, and had her own therapy sessions with Mildred Brown.

In November 2001 Fran, despite her top ratings, and 600 other radio employees were laid off by the corporate owner Clear Channel Communications. She was not able to get a replacement gig, except for a guest week on KFOX in July 2002.

In August Fran had surgery with Pierre Brassard in Montreal. Erika not only went to Montreal with Fran, she insisted on observing the operation.

The lack of work continued for some years, but Fran is now a multi-media web producer outside Austin, Texas.

*Not either of the actresses, nor the jazz singer.
www.auntfran.com

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According to auntfran.com and Wikipedia Fran's mother was Evelyn Knight: however Sam McManis makes Evelyn to be Ericka's mother:  "Erika's mother, former big-band singer Evelyn Knight, did not disown him, as feared".

Evelyn's IMDB page lists only one child: Andrew.!!!

13 February 2014

Billie Dodson (1876 - 1914) female impersonator, milliner

Billie Dodson was raised in the town of El Monte, California which was founded during the 1849 gold rush and is today part Los Angeles County. From the time of his birth his mother was an invalid. He spent his childhood by her side sewing, knitting and crocheting. When she died he stayed with his father doing the cooking, mending and housekeeping, and tending to the younger children.

When Billie left home, he went into vaudeville as a female impersonator making his own costumes. Being feminine came naturally to him, and he met acclaim for his performances.

However he felt obliged to return home to look after his father and step-mother. He hung out a shingle in El Monte as a milliner, and sold hats, corsets, garters etc. all made by himself. His shop became a women's social center where they would talk and talk and drink tea. His creations were sough far and wide. Also at family gatherings Billie would socialize with the women, and avoid the men.

A Los Angeles Times reporter wrote:
"The odd thing about Billie Dodson is that he lacks the offensive and wholesome suggestion that usually lingers about an effeminate man. He is more like a kind-hearted, sensible, cheery woman."
In 1905 Billie married an actress who had newly arrived from Seattle. Two years later Mr Dodson sought and was given a divorce. He married again in 1910. He then returned to the stage with a two-year engagement on the Pantages circuit.

He died at age 38.

10 February 2014

31 trans persons in Spain/Spanish America who changed things by example or achievement

  • Catalino De Erauso (1592 – 1650) nun, soldier, adventurer. EN.WIKIPEDIA 
  • Fernando Mackenzie (1836 - ?) Madrid policeman. GVWW
  • Maria Salomé Rodríguez Tripiona (1880 - ?) Spanish torera. GVWW
  • Luís Fernando de Orleans y Borbón (1888 – 1945) Infante, dancer. GVWW    EN.WIKIPEDIA
  • Amelio Robles (1889 – 1984) Mexican Revolutionary Colonel. ES.WIKIPEDIA
  • Geraldine Portica (189? - ?) Mexican maid. GVWW
  • Florencia Pla Mesegue (1917 – 2004) Castellon shepherd, maquis, political prisoner GVWW 

  • Nelly Finesca (1920 – 1963) Peruvian poet. GVWW
  • Jordi Torremadé (1923 - ?) Barcelona athlete, sales manager. GVWW
  • Carmen de Mairena (1933 - ) Barcelona singer, performer. GVWW    ES.WIKIPEDIA
  • Esdras Parra (1939 – 2004) Venezuelan writer, painter. GVWW   ES.WIKIPEDIA
  • Fulvia Celica Siguas Sandova (194? - 2004) Peruvian performer. GVWW    EN.WIKIPEDIA
  • Bibíana Manuela Fernández Chica (1954 - ) Moroccan-Spanish actress, performer GVWW ES.WIKIPEDIA
  • Tamara Adrián Hernández (1954 – ) Venezuelan lawyer. GVWW   ES.WIKIPEDIA
  • Alejandra Victoria Portatadino (1959 - ) Buenos Aires petroleum engineer, anthropologist, lawyer. GVWW
  • Carla Antonelli (1961 - ) Madrid actress, activist. GVWW    ES.WIKIPEDIA
  • Antonia San Juan (1961 - ) Madrid actress, director, monologist. GVWW   ES.WIKIPEDIA
  • Manuela Trasobares Haro (1962 - ) Castellon artist, singer, politician. GVWW ES.WIKIPEDIA
  • Cristina Ortiz Rodriguez (1964 - ) Madrid sex worker, singer, prisoner. GVWW ES.WIKIPEDIA
  • Andrés Ignacio Rivera Duarte (1964–) Chilean professor, activist. GVWW
  • Marcela Romero (1964 - ) Buenos Aires activist. GVWW
  • Cris Miró (1968 -1999) Buenos Aires performer. GVWW    ES.WIKIPEDIA
  • Andrea Paredes (1971 - ) Chilean financial consultant, tennis player. NewsArticle.
  • Charlotte Goiar (1972 - ) Galacian founder of HBS. GVWW

  • Wendy Iriepa (1974 - ) Cuban office worker. GVWW
  • Monica León (1975 - ) Buenos Aires activist. GVWW
  • Florencia de la V (1976 - ) Buenos Aires actress. GVWW ES.WIKIPEDIA
  • Endry Cardeño (1976 - ) Colombian actress. GVWW    EN.WIKIPEDIA
  • Amaranta Gómez Regalado (1977 - ) Oaxacan activist. GVWW ES.WIKIPEDIA
  • Miriam Rivera (1981 - ) Mexican reality TV performer, model. EN.WIKIPEDIA
  • Jenny (198? - ) Colombian soldier, beautician. GVWW

07 February 2014

Asha Devi (1952 - 2013 ) mayor.

Amarnath Yadav was the youngest of four brothers and three sisters, and was discarded by her parents. She was taken in by hijra Samaj, and took the name Asha Devi.

While only semi-literate, she ran in 2000 for the post of mayor in Gorakhpur, eastern Uttar Pradesh, a post reserved for a woman. Other candidates objected that she was not a woman, but the pradesh Election Commission ruled that her sex was to be decided by how she was enroled in the voters’ list, and on the precedent of Shabnam Mausi, the Madya Pradesh MLA.

Shabnam campaigned on her behalf. In November 2000 she won over one lakh (1,09,849) votes. Every other candidate including the one from Bharatiya Janata Party lost her deposit.

During her tenure she concentrated on the construction of roads and drainage.

In May 2003 her election was declared invalid on the grounds that the post was reserved for a female, and that Asha is not female. This was in response to a petition by from the Samajwadi Party candidate, who had had come second but received over 60,000 fewer votes.

Asha died aged 61 from a kidney disorder.

*Not the film actress, nor the mother of Delhi rape victim, Jyoti Singh.

04 February 2014

Kate Stone (1969 - ) research scientist

Stone was born in Cheshire, with a father who was a continent-hopping engineer. This led to learning experiences in disparate cultures, and short spells in all sorts of schools. Leaving school having failed A-Levels, Stone went travelling and worked on a sheep ranch in Australia.

After a degree in Electronics at Salford University, Stone, who by then had a wife and child, was offered a PhD in Physics at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory which was completed in 2000. The work was in moving electrons, and led to putting electronics into the ink on paper. In 2004 Novalia was incorporated to market the technology.

In 2007 Stone made two major life changes:
"I'm an embedded researcher in an engineering department, and the group of people around me are all guys—there's about 10 guys here—and one day at work I told them. As I remember it, it was on a Monday, we were all sitting together in the kitchen at lunchtime, and everyone was just sat around, and I say, oh guys, I've got something to tell you. I've decided I'm going to become a woman, so I'm going to start coming to work dressed as a woman. They looked at me, and one guy looked at another guy and said, can you pass the chilli sauce please! And the conversation continued as if I hadn't said anything!
The next day, we were all sitting down at lunchtime, and I said, guys, I've got another announcement to make. I've decided that I'm going to become vegetarian. And their reaction—they were stunned! They were like, oh my god! How long have you felt like this? How are you going to cope without the meat! Have you really thought this through! So not eating meat they find a little difficult to deal with, but the other thing—whatever. So I guess at a certain point I started coming to work as Kate, changed my name, and it was absolutely fine. Not a problem at all."
In 2013 Kate was a profiled speaker at the TED conference.

In late December Kate, while on a new-years break near Fort William in Scotland, was chatting with friends after returning from a ceilidh when she was attacked and gored in the throat and chest by a stag that had gotten into the fenced garden. Kate was airlifted to the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, where she was put into an induced coma.

She survived, but was dismayed by the cavalier way that her past personal life had been featured in some newspapers while she was still in a coma.  The Press Complaints Commission accepted her complaint, and six newspapers agreed to amend their online stories.
www.novalia.co.uk      http://about.me/drkatestone.


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Apparently attacks by stags like this are very rare.  The problem seems to be that it panicked after getting into an enclosed space.   It is suggested that it went for Dr Stone in that she was the tallest person in the group.

The article in The Guardian did not even mention that Dr Stone is transgender.   Even The Daily Mail reduced the fact to a incidental close to the end of its article.   The only paper to put that fact in its headline was The Daily Record:  "Transgender scientist in hospital after being gored in the throat by stag in horror Highlands attack". 

01 February 2014

Stanley H. Biber (1923 - 2006) surgeon, general practitioner, rancher, weight-lifter.

Stanley Biber was raised in Des Moines, Iowa by a father who owned a furniture store. He trained as a concert pianist and attended a rabbinical seminary. During World War II he was a civilian employee of the Office of Stategic Services and stationed in Alaska and the Northwest Territories. He graduated from the University of Iowa Medical School in 1948. He was an outstanding weight-lifter and just failed to make the US Olympic team. He was a MASH chief surgeon with the US army in the Korean War.

In 1954 he took a job at a United Mine Workers clinic in Trinidad, Colorado, a town where Frenchy Vosbaugh had operated a restaurant in the late nineteenth century, where Malvina Perry had been taken to court for her circus act, and just east of Segundo where Alice Baker had worked as a male teacher. Biber was the only surgeon in town, doing everything from gunshot wounds to Caesarian births to appendectomies.

He bought a small ranch and 25 head of cattle, and then expanded it. One year he took a bull to the Colorado State Fair and placed second in his class.

Biber did his first sex change surgery in 1968 for Ann, a social-worker friend who had been completing her real-life test without his realizing. Biber consulted with Harry Benjamin, who had started Ann on estrogens, and then sent to the Johns Hopkins Hospital for diagrams describing Dr. Georges Burou's technique.

Trinidad's only hospital was Mount San Rafael, a Roman Catholic hospital. After hiding the first few cases because of possible objections, Biber gave a series of lectures to the local Ministerial Alliance about the psychological needs of transsexuals and what his surgery entailed.
"Much to my amazement, there was no opposition. They were very understanding and accepting. All of a sudden, townspeople became very sophisticated and knew everything about transsexuals."
However there was some reaction: a colleague resigned, in part because of the transgender surgeries, he had problems with insurance, and was admonished for poor record keeping. On the other hand the surgeries brought in almost a million dollars a year and definitely helped the hospital remain financially viable. A local was reported as saying:

"After my hysterectomy, I went to Denver, and one of my friends said, 'You didn't let that doctor do it.' And I said, 'I certainly did.' They looked at me funny. 'But he does that kind of surgery.' And I said, 'Which proves how good he is. You have to be darn good to do that.' They never thought of it that way."
In the late-1970s when the Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic and others closed, Dr Biber became the major alternate source of transgender surgery in the US. Fletcher summarizes Biber's approach:

"First, patients must pass at least two psychiatric evaluations ensuring that they're not homosexuals or transvestites or simply people seeking fame and fortune on the talk-show circuit. True transsexuals, Biber says, are not attracted to members of the same sex and do not become aroused by wearing clothes of the opposite sex. True transsexuals consciously and subconsciously believe they are members of the opposite sex, trapped in the wrong body. ... Next, patients must receive hormone therapy for at least a year and live in the role of the opposite sex for the same period. If the adjustment is successful and another evaluation approved, plastic surgery is recommended. Then, and only then, will they get a consultation with Biber, who makes the final call. If he senses doubt, hesitation or confusion, which he does about 5 percent of the time, he sends patients home. As a consolation, he often performs minor cosmetic surgery first, such as an Adam's-apple reduction or breast augmentation."

He quotes the doctor:
"After doing so many of these, you develop a gut feeling. A bell will go off and you'll know something is wrong, even if they came with good evaluations. You certainly don't want to make a mistake. You've got to have a feel for if they're really worried about being a transsexual or if they're just scared of the surgery. It helps me in my own mind to know I'm doing the right thing."
Dr Biber went on to do thousands of the operation, resulting in Trinidad, Colorado becoming known as the “Sex-Change Capital of the World”, and also trained other surgeons in transgender surgery. He  became a celebrity and appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Sally Jessy Raphael Show, Geraldo Rivera Show, the Learning Channel, the Discovery Channel, the Playboy channel and the Guinness World Records Primetime TV show.

He and his wife had seven children, he owned the largest cattle ranch in the county, and served as a Las Animas County commissioner from 1990 to 1996.

Notable patients include:
1968 Ann.
1976 Yasmene Jabar,
1978 Diane Delia,
1979 Nancy Ledins,
        Joseph Cluse,
1980 Edie Lane,
1981 Susan Faye Cannon,
         Kay Brown,  
1983 Walt Heyer,
         Rosalyne Blumenstein,
1984 Susan Kimberly,
        Brenda Lana Smith,
1986 Kate Bornstein,
        Leslie Nelson  
1989 Les Nichols
1990 Rene Jaz
1991 Valerie Taylor,
1992 Claudine Griggs,
        Cynthia Conroy,
1994 Melanie Anne Phillips,
        Terri O'Connell,
1995 Gloria Hemingway,

Dr Biber would also mention in interviews that he did the operation on twins, on three brothers from Georgia and an 84-year-old railroad engineer.
"I've got one patient married to a gynecologist, and he doesn't know: She won't tell him."
He performed three reversals: The first patient, whose original operation was performed by another surgeon, proved not to be a true transsexual and developed psychological problems. The second was a renowned mathematician who succumbed to intense peer pressure. The third patient used the procedure to appear on talk shows, then decided to switch back. (Heyer?)

Dr Biber retired at the age of 80, when his malpractice insurance became too expensive, although he was able to find insurance to continue as a general practitioner. His transsexual practice was taken over by Marci Bowers.

Biber died at age 82 from complications from pneumonia, shortly after returning from a cattle drive to Texas.
EN.WIKIPEDIA