INE FLAIN DEALEK, SUNDAY, MAY 19, 1974

Casablanca surgeon is a sex-change specialist

By Michael Goldsmith

CASABLANCA, Morocco (A) — It's like a fashionable gynecologist's waiting room anywhere in the world. Young women, some accompanied by their husbands, anxiously await their turn while nurses scurry about.

Every few days, though, a different kind of patient rings at Dr. Georges Burou's door: a man, invariably alone, comes by appointment to be transformed into a woman.

Dr. Burou, 63-year-old French surgeon and gynecologist, is regarded as a pioneer of the sex change operation. Since he first developed his method in 1956, he has performed

nearly 1,000 such operations. Many of his patients have been Americans.

"I know of no other doc-

tor in the world who has

done more than about 60 such interventions," he said in a rare interview.

Although his renown has spread through what he calls "a kind of trans-sexual Mafia," Dr. Burou shuns publicity. He waited more than 16 years before presenting the first scientific paper on his technique to a medical congress.

The sun-tanned, athleticlooking physician says he entered the sex-change field almost by accident.

"A patient, a French electrical engineer, pestered me for months to do

it because he could no longer endure life as a man.

"I finally consented and tried it as an experiment. Surprisingly, it worked, and the patient has lived very satisfactorily as a woman ever since."

That was in 1956. In Feb-

ruary, 1973, Dr. Burou publicly revealed his method at a Stanford University sym-

posium on trans-sexualism.

Dr. Burou's surgical technique has been adopted and modified by surgeons in the United States and elsewhere.

There have been 500 to 600 such operations in the United States in the last five to six years, according to a physician familiar with the subject.

Two surgeons in New York City have done 100-150 each and the operation is performed at Johns tion is performed at Johns Hopkins University, the Hopkins University, the University of Minnesota and Stanford. University.

Dr. Burou calls his operation "basically plastic surgery," because his newly. transformed women can never hope to have babies..

"But they become women in every other respect. The sensitivity remains unchanged. The breasts develop naturally, with the help of hormone treatment."

Dr. Burou said his patients come from all parts. tients come from all parts of the world and from all walks of life. Almost half of them are Americans.. Others come from western Europe and Japan. Their average age is 30 but his oldest patient was a 70-year-old German.

"I often get appeals from patients to operate on their teen-aged sons," Burou said. "I tell them they have to wait until the boy comes of age, because the operation is final and irreversible and you can't risk making a mistake.”

He said he successfuly operated on a 50-year-old French Roman Catholic priest, an Italian university professor, several fellow doctors, some writers and artists and "quite a large number of prostitutes and transvestite performers.'

"

Dr. Burou almost never follows up a former patient's career and doesn't know what happened to the priest. "I think most of them want to forget they ever had to undergo such an operation,” he said.

“They are nearly always people who spent all their

lives yearning to be women, from the time their parents failed to understand why the little boy wanted to play with dolls."

British author James Morris, who at 43 decided to undergo surgery and be come Jan Morris, wrote about "Dr. B" in her new book "Conundrum." It describes Morris's decision to change sex, and the opera-

tion in Casablanca.

Dr. Burou stressed that the impulse to change sex is almost invariably mental, not physical. "It is never a problem of hormones or chromosomes,' " he said. ""True hermaphrodites exist, but I have never seen one. The men who come to me need help and they are convinced their bodies are

accidents of nature and nothing can change their minds about it.

"They believe their whole lives are being. ruined by being forced into the wrong body, like a leftwrong body, like a lefthanded person being forced to use only his right hand.”

But Dr. Burou's patients are not homosexuals, either. "A homosexual rather enjoys being a man while these people hate it," he said.

The complex surgery used to take three hours. Dr. Burou has cut it to 90 minutes, followed by three to four weeks of convalescence. The total cost is $5,000, often reduced for patients of limited means.

In recent months, he has done several reverse sexchanges, turning women into men.

mand for this," he said, "There is increasing demand for this,” he said, "and the psychological reasons for it are very similar.

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Unfortunately, it is not quite so simple.

"As an experiment, I have tried several such operations. But a lot of work still remains to be done in this field."