AFS Docs in Progress: Best Kept Secret

In a lot of ways, Trinidad, Colorado isn't so different from other small towns. They've got a population of 9,000, the local economy is transitioning away from once-prosperous mining and ranching, and Christ is Lord.

But Trinidad, like many of its visitors, has a little something extra: Over the past forty years, six thousand people have traveled there to undergo sex-change operations. Dr. Stanley Biber secretly began performing genital-reassignment surgery, or GRS, in 1969, hiding his records from the nuns at the Catholic-run hospital. Not surprisingly, townspeople freaked when they found out about Dr. Biber's 'special' surgeries, but Trinidad's strapped-for-cash hospital needed the income, and the community grew to accept Biber and his transgender patients.

Biber kept at it until he was 80 years old (!), when he handed his practice over to Dr. Marci Bowers. Recently, two former patients of Dr. Bowers moved to Trinidad to open Morning Glow, a recovery facility for recent GRS recipients. This isn't sitting so well with the more conservative residents of Trinidad who, in these increasingly fundamentalist times, are thinking that maybe they don't like the transladies so much after all. To make the town's politics even more complicated, a pile of new wealth from Trinidad's growing natural-gas industry is bringing gentrification to the once-sleepy town. Between the influx of damned soy-drinking New Yorker subscribers and the indignity of living in "Trannydad", a few folks are dismayed about the path Trinidad is taking. Best Kept Secret examines Trinidad's history as a sex-reassignment destination and takes stock of its present and future standings. Most of the community remains cool with Dr. Bowers and her sex-reassignment wizardry, but can Trinidad cope with its, um, womanly pains if the Morning Glow ladies succeed in establishing the town as a "trans mecca"?

AFS Docs In Progress: Best Kept Secret
Tuesday, July 10th
Austin Studios Screening Room
7-10pm, Free (attendance limited to AFS members)
Post-screening Q & A with filmmakers PJ Raval & Jay Hodges
[Info / Tickets]
[Trailer]