Casablanca’s Hidden History: The Pioneering Transgender Surgery Hub of the 1950s

Celebrities, unknown to the public. In the 1950s, many of them went to the Parc clinic in Casablanca to be operated on. In charge, Georges Burou, a gynecologist obstetrician who had already built a reputation in medicine, particularly in abortion. His first transsexual operation dates back to 1956. "I started this specialty almost by accident, because a pretty woman had come to see me. In reality, it was a man, I only knew it afterwards, a sound engineer in Casablanca, aged 23, dressed as a woman [...], with a lovely bust that he had obtained thanks to hormone injections [...]. He told me about his problems [...], having the deep conviction that his boy’s body was a tragic accident of nature and irremediable [...]," recounted to Paris Match the one who was born in France in 1910.

"Faced with this completely new problem for me [...], I studied the male and female pelvis for several months and had him hospitalized at my place, in my clinic, which is next to my office and below my apartment. The operation lasted three hours. The "patient" remained in convalescence for a month. She was satisfied beyond all expression. I had made her a real woman," he had added. In one of the rooms of the Parc clinic, "the future operated women were psychologically prepared for their future condition as women, they were taught to make up to hide their Adam’s apple, to walk like a woman..." Quickly, Dr. Burou made a name for himself in this new specialty of the time, and his reputation went beyond the Moroccan borders.

Among the celebrities operated on were Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy, a Music Hall star at the Parisian Carrousel, known by the pseudonym Coccinelle, her cabaret colleague, Bambi, the Dutch artist Colette Berends and the most famous British transsexual April Ashley. "In the mid-1970s, Dr. Burou has more than 800 operations to his credit," we are told. These exploits have placed Casablanca for a long time in the world pantheon of cities that count in surgery. In 1987, Dr. Burou died at sea off Pont Blondin, a beach north of Casablanca, after his boat capsized.