[Episcopal News Service] Growing up in rural Western New York, the Very Rev. Micah Cronin couldn’t have imagined his present role as dean of the Episcopal cathedral in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was raised in more conservative churches, and as a young adult, “I did not feel that I fit there,” he said, because they were not fully accepting of him as a transgender man. At the same time, Cronin’s faith was as central to his identity as his gender, and he told himself, “I don’t think it’s feasible to me to not be Christian.” Then at age 19, he began attending worship services at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, a small congregation in Olean, New York. “They welcomed me immediately and beautifully, so I said, I guess I’m Episcopalian now,” Cronin recalled in an interview with Episcopal News Service. Now 30, Cronin has followed his spiritual calling to the priesthood, and in August he began as dean of All Saints’ Cathedral, an LGBTQ+-affirming congregation in downtown Milwaukee with an average Sunday attendance of about 70. He is thought to be the first transgender dean of any Episcopal cathedral and also one of the youngest. His top priority is settling in with his new congregation — “I’m excited to get to know them” — though he also sees himself and other transgender Episcopal leaders as playing a vital role in American communities like Milwaukee at a time when the Trump administration and many of its Republican supporters have vilified transgender people in both their rhetoric and their policies. “The way I see our moment in The Episcopal Church right now is being a church that has taken a stand to welcome and include because of its Christian faith,” Cronin said. Many transgender Americans, he added, may not realize that denominations like The Episcopal Church teach that Christianity is about love. “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,” he said. “I think we have a chance to preach the Gospel in places it wouldn’t otherwise be heard.” Other trans Episcopalians who have experienced a similar sense of welcome in The Episcopal Church now are celebrating Cronin’s new role as dean. “It is so moving how the Episcopal Church has been a place where [Cronin] could follow Jesus authentically and step more fully into his vocation as a human being and a priest,” said the Rev. Cameron Partridge, the rector a St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco, California, who is active in the group TransEpiscopal. Partridge, in a statement to ENS for this story, noted that the Rev. Gari Green, a founding member of TransEpiscopal, was a priest in the former Diocese of Milwaukee until her death in 2024, the same year that the state’s three Episcopal dioceses reunited as the Diocese of Wisconsin. “I think Gari would see this moment as a true sign of hope and transformative possibility for our church and our world.” Aaron Scott, the Episcopal Church staff officer for gender justice, also invoked Green’s legacy as one of the church’s first openly trans priests. And he referenced Romans 14:13: “Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother or sister.” “It’s powerful for The Episcopal Church to be able to live that scripture out, especially in a time when discrimination and scapegoating of transgender people is escalating,” Scott told ENS. Cronin and All Saints’ Cathedral are showing “what it looks like when Christians remove those stumbling blocks, so that God and the people can simply call the right person for the job.” Cronin’s journey to All Saints’ Cathedral followed a winding road. He was first baptized as a child into the Free Methodist Church — in a backyard pool during a summer cookout, he recalled. He later attended other churches in the Wesleyan tradition and attended a Wesleyan college, Houghton, in Western New York. Cronin heard about The Episcopal Church from an acquaintance who said it was more accepting of trans people. The church’s emphasis on the Eucharist also was a change from the services he attended as a child that focused more on the power of the preacher’s sermon. Almost immediately after Cronin started attending Episcopal services, he felt a call to ordained ministry. “I just kind of felt this pull toward Holy Communion, toward the altar,” he said. He attended Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, and as a student he also served as a lay chaplain at a psychiatric hospital in Trenton. He was ordained as a deacon and then a priest in 2022 in the Diocese of New Jersey. In 2025, he moved to Milwaukee with his husband, a Presbyterian pastor, who had been called to lead a Presbyterian campus ministry at the city’s University of Wisconsin campus. Cronin found an interim rector role at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Madison, the state’s capital city, and commuted there from Milwaukee, a little more than an hour away. When the opportunity opened at All Saints’ Cathedral, Cronin jumped at the chance to lead the historic congregation, which worships in a building more than 150 years old. “It’s a place that prides itself on beautiful liturgy … on the sacred space created by high church liturgy,” Cronin said. The congregation also regularly raises money to support feeding ministries and was involved in the founding in the 1980s of the hunger relief organization The Gathering, which now is an independent nonprofit in Milwaukee. Being the first transgender cathedral dean underscores for Cronin how he and other transgender Christians feel at home in The Episcopal Church. “What I have found in The Episcopal Church is a place where I can exist exactly as who I am and be found by Jesus,” he said, “and help other people find Jesus.” The climate outside the […]
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