Yes, internally UDTs (User Defined Types), which is how geography
is implemented, get stored as binary, however, they are recognized by the database engine as being more than that.
SQL Server automatically deserializes the binary back into a .NET object when you access it, and also serializes the .NET object to binary for storage.
So, when you call methods on UDT instances, whether in a variable or a column, they respond as you would expect:
declare @var geography =
geography::Point(51.4618933852762, -0.926690306514502, 4326);
select @var.ToString()