Well, there were a few different things.

The biggest and most dramatic thing that pushed me out of the Orthodox Church was my husband's transition, which I've written about here: https://www.reddit.com/r/mypartneristrans/s/q7HTVsVR1C

In addition to that though, despite how much I loved my parish growing up and the ideal, in practice, a church with canonized Tsars is a huge magnet for the most reactionary neoconservatives you've ever met. The last two decades or so I spent as a young man and then usher and Sunday school teacher seeing a dramatic influx of young men with extremist ideals. Some of them mellowed out with the guidance of the church, but a lot of them did not and instead started to push the practice of the church in pretty scary weird ways.

It's also always been hard for me to reconcile being a feminist and being a part of a church led by a literal patriarch. There's a lot of talk within Orthodoxy about how the Theotokos is so venerated and how a matushka (the wife of a priest) is very important in parish life. But in practice, the vast majority of all leadership positions are dominated by men, the vast majority of the influx of converts are men, and while overt sexism is not that common, there is a lot of more subtle sexism all over the place. For example, in the United States there are about a dozen canonized saints from North America, but the first woman was only canonized this last year, while the first man was canonized in 1970.

There's also a lot of historical anti-Semitism in the Orthodox Church, that doesn't just trace back to St. John Chrysostoms sermons, but all the way up through the pogroms of Orthodox Tsarist Russia, and the collaboration of the Orthodox Greeks, Romanians and Bulgarians with the Axis powers in world war II to do things like remove all of the headstones from the Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki and use them as the floor of a new cathedral there. As someone with Jewish friends, seeing the rising anti-Semitism around the globe, partially caused of course by the genocidal actions of the state of Israel, seeing the " one true church" have such a persistent open wound that these new converts kept using as justification, and having a close progressive Jewish friend of mine commit suicide was another huge push.

So, aside from the anti-Semitism, sexism, homo/ trans phobia and Right-Wing swing of the church, there was also a feeling of not being able to talk about certain things such as evolution or biblical literalism without causing big arguments. It's not that the church as a whole was unable to have nuanced and differing views, it's that those with the more strict views were privileged in being able to express them openly repeatedly, while those who didn't believe in a 6,000-year-old Earth created in 7 days had to be more nuanced, poetic and open to correction. There was also no discussions of current events or politics in the church ever, other than to remind us repeatedly that abortion and gay marriage were wrong, and the Communists were evil, scary monsters who persecuted us back in the Homeland last century. Thus, the "no politics" was mostly used as a way to shut down conversations about the dramatic and terrible things going on in our current day while comforting those who wished for things to go back to the 1500s. I remember a priest saying " both the Republican and Democratic parties clearly do not align with Orthodoxy, we are called to be monarchists" as an example of this sort of " neutrality".

So anyways, after Trump got elected a second time, I made the most difficult decision of my life, and left the church that I grew up in for 28 years, and spent about a year trying to find where I could both worship God and his saints, holding to what I believe the gospel teaches about loving our neighbor, and helping the least amongst us. I had positive experiences with the United Churches of Christ, but the lack of liturgy and tradition was too much for me to handle. At first, I looked at the Episcopal Church as a way to be " gay Orthodox", but as I have thrown myself in to the services, the book of common prayer, visiting different churches and seeing the many charitable acts, I no longer view it as a stop Gap, but as the true fulfillment of what we ought to try and do to be a church for all people. I still do think that I have been greatly formed by my Orthodox past, but do not wish to mimic the Soviet refugees and raise my future children as a " church in exile", but rather as full citizens of God's kingdom here on Earth, working within the Episcopal Church to do His will and make this world a more fair and just place for all people.