On Sunday, Wedgewood Church in Charlotte will celebrate Nancy Ledins, a congregant who began life in 1932 as William Griglak, became a Roman Catholic priest in 1959 and underwent a sex-change operation in 1979.
She died last week at age 84, said Wedgewood co-pastor Chris Ayers.
Decades before Caitlin Jenner and HB2 turned the status of transgender persons into a national debate, Ledins made headlines around the country as perhaps the first female priest in the history of the Catholic church, as the Los Angeles Times put it in a 1980 article.
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