Please ignore this if you thing doing this will worsen your mental well-being in anyway
As someone who was in the Orthodox Church was a queer woman, left, and has come back to to Christianity as an exile of sorts from Orthodoxy, can you speak about what your was like in the Orthodox Church? I’m also a queer person transitioning to Orthodoxy and I just would like gain more insight on what to expect and such.
Thank you 🙏🏾
Hello, I remember interacting with you before my hiatus! I won't speak much on my experiences in the Church, but I can tell you what to expect. What you can expect is highly dependent on your parish, the parish's priest, and that priest's bishop. The doctrine is clear, of course, that homosexuality and gender transition are both sinful, but the Orthodox Church gives bishops and priests immense authority in the pastoral application of doctrine, known as oikonomia. It also depends on the exact nature of your queerness; for example if you are gay but celibate the effects on your relationship with the Church are much lesser compared to if you are openly in same-sex relationships. For me, I am asexual and even if I weren't, I date women and the Church sees me as a man, so the problem with me in the Church's eyes was mostly if not entirely me being transgender. The immediate barrier for a convert is that it is entirely possible that the priest will simply refuse to baptise you at all if you are "unrepentant" in their words. This is because Baptism involves forsaking all sin and everything to do with the Devil, as well as a promise to adhere to Orthodox doctrine, and if you are consistently committing what they deem a sin while insisting it is not sinful, you are failing both of those prerequisites. For example, in 2022, His Eminence Elpidophoros (the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America) was reprimanded by both the Holy Synod and the EP's Synod for baptising not even a gay couple but the children of a gay couple. For some parishes, being baptised may require nothing short of celibacy or detransitioning. If you are baptised, you face the issue of whether or not you will be allowed to take communion. Generally, if a parish will baptise you despite you being openly queer, they will also let you take communion, and if a parish won't baptise someone due to queerness, they will certainly deny communion due to queerness as well. If everything fits together perfectly - your priest is sympathetic, your parish doesn't fall into scandal, and your bishop is sympathetic - you can be openly queer and live a good life in the Church like any other layperson. Worst case scenario, you don't get into the Church at all. Then, there is the area which was the dealbreaker for me. In almost every case except celibate gay men, you are forever locked to the laity and nothing more. It's quite unlikely that you will be allowed to serve behind the ikonostasis and it's impossible for you to ever be ordained. If you are fine with this, great. If you aren't, then you have three options: deal with it, suppress your queerness to try to adhere to doctrine (like me), or exile yourself to a more accepting church even if you aren't entirely on board with them (also like me). This all assumes that you are upfront and honest about your queerness with your priest, as I morally cannot condone lying to a priest, even by omission. I hope this helps a little.













