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Going to Trinidad by Martin J. Smith
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Going to Trinidad

A Doctor, a Colorado Town, and Stories from an Unlikely Gender Crossroads

$20.99

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Narrator Natasha Soudek

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Length 8 hours 51 minutes
Language English
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For more than four decades, between 1969 and 2010, the remote former mining town of Trinidad, Colorado, was the unlikely crossroads for approximately six thousand medical pilgrims who came looking for relief from the pain of gender dysphoria. The surgical skill and nonjudgmental compassion of surgeons Stanley Biber and his transgender protégé Marci Bowers not only made the phrase "going to Trinidad" a euphemism for gender confirmation surgery in the worldwide transgender community, but also turned the small outpost near the New Mexico border into what the New York Times once called "the sex-change capital of the world."

Award-winning writer Martin J. Smith spent two years researching not only the stories of Trinidad, Biber, and Bowers, but also tracking the lives of many transgender men and women who sought their services. The result is Going to Trinidad, which focuses on the complicated pre- and post-surgery lives of two Biber patients—Claudine Griggs and Walt Heyer—who experienced very different outcomes. Through them, Smith takes listeners deep into the often-mystifying world of gender, genitalia, and sexuality, and chronicles a fascinating segment of the human species that's often misunderstood by those for whom gender remains a mostly binary male-or-female equation.

Martin J. Smith, a veteran journalist and former senior editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, is the author of five crime novels and four previous nonfiction books. He has won more than fifty newspaper and magazine writing awards, and his novels have been nominated for three of the publishing industry's most prestigious honors, including the Edgar Award, the Anthony Award, and the Barry Award.

If you've watched TV at all in the past ten years, you've definitely seen her face and heard her voice countless times in any number of wildly successful national, global, and Super Bowl commercials, as well as playing the first blond Vulcan in Star Trek history. The daughter of two English professors, Natasha Soudek was raised in the South, speaks native German, lived in Berlin and Vienna, and finally settled in the Lower East Side of New York City as a teenager. After honing her stage presence by studying acting and playing hundreds of sold-out live music shows (singing and playing bass), she moved to LA to record with Channel/DreamWorks and act on TV. Favored on KCRW, Chris Douridas compared her voice and songwriting to the Beatles' Let it Be in meaning and soulfulness . . . qualities that translate especially well into her career as an audiobook narrator. Her voice is as distinct and memorable as the range of characters she's played on-screen, which gives listeners an immediate familiarity to connect to, along with a warmth and intimacy that spans and uplifts any genre.

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Shop the sale

In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!

Shop now
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale