Morocco having a reputation for being the "go-to" place for sex reassignment surgery in the 70s and 80s has to do with just a single clinic, Clinique du Parc - located at 13 Rue La Pebie, Casablanca - and a single surgeon, Georges Burou. Burou was a French gynecologist who grew up in Algiers and moved to Casablanca as a young man with his fiance and began practicing gynecology there.

Burou began his work in SRS when he encountered a "male patient who insisted upon sex reassignment surgery" from Burou, and who was the impetus for him to create his novice method of performing the surgery. Although he himself was unaware of other surgeons performing SRS, Burou was certainly not the first surgeon to perform sex reassignment surgery. However he was the surgeon to pioneer what's known as the "penile inversion vaginoplasty" in the mid-1950s, a technique which uses the penile skin to form the lining of the surgically-created vaginal canal and which is still the predominant variation of the surgery used today (although it is losing ground to newer techniques).

Burou was also the first surgeon to perform the surgery as a matter of routine and at such large numbers. He performed his first SRS in 1956 and over his career he had performed at least 800 sex reassignment surgeries, with some other estimates giving much higher numbers. By the time Burou gave his first public presentation on his technique in 1974 other surgeons around the world had already reverse engineered the PIV method.

Burou was a fairly private man himself, but performed the surgery on several high-profile transsexual women, such as April Ashley and Coccinelle, which boosted his profile outside of just the transgender women and SRS surgeon circles. Jan Morris wrote about her experience in her 1974 memoir Conundrum which helped put Morocco on the map as the "sex change capital of the world", and others would later write about their experiences as well.

Burou drowned in 1989, but decades later his techniques and innovations in the field of sex reassignment surgery are still relevant.

Source:

Hage JJ, Karim RB, Laub DR Sr. On the origin of pedicled skin inversion vaginoplasty: life and work of Dr Georges Burou of Casablanca. Ann Plast Surg. 2007 Dec;59(6):723-9. doi: 10.1097/01.sap.0000258974.41516.bc. PMID: 18046160.