The Episcopal Church has its first known transgender dean. The Very Rev. Micah Cronin, 30, took the helm of All Saints' Cathedral in Milwaukee last August, becoming the senior priest and chief executive of the congregation, and one of the youngest deans in the denomination.
From a Backyard Baptism to the Altar
Cronin's path to the priesthood started far from Milwaukee. Baptized as a Methodist in a backyard pool during a childhood cookout, he later attended Wesleyan churches and a Wesleyan college, both part of a more conservative strain of Methodism. He didn't fit there, he has said, and his fellow congregants didn't fully accept him as a trans man. An acquaintance eventually pointed him toward the Episcopal Church, and at 19 he found an affirming congregation in Olean, New York, that changed his trajectory.
He went on to Princeton Theological Seminary, worked as a lay chaplain at a psychiatric hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, and was ordained as a deacon and priest in the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey. There, he wrote publicly about extending grace even to people hostile to LGBTQ+ acceptance, a theme he's carried into his new role leading a congregation that averages around 70 people each Sunday.
Just by me existing as a trans person and as a priest, I get to have conversations with people that very few people get to have.
The Very Rev. Micah Cronin
A Half-Century of Institutional Change
Cronin's appointment lands on a long arc. The Episcopal Church passed a resolution recognizing LGBTQ+ people's place in the church at its 1976 General Convention, decades before most American denominations engaged the question at all. In 2003, it ordained Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, becoming the first major U.S. Christian denomination with an openly gay bishop. The church has since lifted restrictions on same-sex marriage across its dioceses and opened its schools to transgender students.
Transgender clergy have followed a slower curve. As of a few years ago, the Episcopal Church still had no openly transgender or non-binary bishops, even as a small but growing number of trans and non-binary priests and deacons entered its ranks. Cronin's elevation to dean, a more senior administrative and pastoral post, marks new ground within that slower-moving track.
MQ's Take
It's worth sitting with how unusual it still is for a denomination to hand its most senior local leadership post to an openly trans priest, even one as progressive as the Episcopal Church. Gay bishops arrived over two decades ago; transgender leadership at this level is only now catching up, and it's happening against a political backdrop where, as Cronin himself has noted, trans people are being cast as a threat rather than treated as neighbors. Milwaukee's diocese has its own quiet history here too: the late Rev. Gari Green, a founding member of the trans-affirming group TransEpiscopal, served there until her death in 2024. Cronin's appointment reads less like a sudden leap than the payoff of work people like Green put in for years, largely out of the national spotlight.
Not Without Friction
None of this is universally embraced even inside the Episcopal Church. Some members and dioceses have pushed back on the broader inclusion agenda, citing traditional readings of scripture, even as the denomination's overall direction has kept trending toward welcome. Cronin's own writing has addressed that tension directly, arguing the church is called to engage people who find its inclusiveness objectionable, not to write them off.
Sources: them., LGBTQ Nation, The Advocate
Cover photo: James Steakley, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
