“What do we do now?” That was the question LGBTQ+ folks, racial minorities, and immigrants across the United States asked their friends and family as the news rolled in that Donald Trump would be president again. Some people considered leaving the country, causing a 1,500% spike in Google Searches about emigration. Others wondered how to care for their communities and prepare a rocky four years. However, for a small group of women, one term came up again and again: 4B.
If you only see a few posts online, 4B appears to be a simple movement created by South Korean feminists. The movement has four tenets, each starting with the Korean word “bi,” which means “no.” The four tenets—or “4 no’s”—are biyeonae (no dating), bisekseu (no sex), bihon (no marriage), and bichulsan (no childbirth).
Within hours of Trump’s win, the idea of adopting 4B in the United States began to circulate widely online. Just one day after the election, content creator brielleybelly123 posted a (now-deleted) video on TikTok saying, “All I have to say is good luck getting laid, especially in Florida, because me and my girlies are participating in the 4B movement.” In less than a month, her video had been played 1.7 million times, garnered 191,400 likes, and generated 16,000 comments.
For American women looking for a way to respond politically to Trump’s victory, 4B seems to offer a somewhat easy means of punishing conservative men for their votes or persuading them to vote differently in the future. Videos like @brielleybelly123’s quickly filled the 4B hashtag on TikTok and were then reposted to other social media platforms.
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However as these videos popped up, so did concerns from South Korean women—both within and outside of the LGBTQ+ community. Some English-speaking women of the Korean diaspora have largely turned to social media to share not only their own impressions and insights, but those of fellow Korean women—cis and trans—who may not be able to or feel comfortable speaking out.
Their overarching message? That American women haven’t done enough research into 4B, otherwise they would know that 4B is actually the creation of a very small transphobic, homophobic, misandrist fringe group.
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A quick breakdown on 4B’s origins: In mid-2015 a radical online feminist group created Megalia, a message board where women organized to respond to the misogyny and harassment they faced online by trolling and mirroring the hate speech they encountered. By December, anti-trans, and anti-LGBTQ+ posts on the message board led moderators to ban hate speech against queer and trans individuals, as well as any campaign of harassment of another person.
Upset by these changes, the most extreme members broke away from Megalia and created their own group—WOMAD—in January 2016. A portmanteau of “woman” and “nomad,” WOMAD is exclusively online, with no headquarters or physical space. On these message boards, women admitted to sexual assault and poisoning men with anti-freeze. Some united to lobby against a transgender woman’s admission to Sookmyung Women’s University, claiming her attendance would be a “woman’s safety” issue, and eventually pressured the student into withdrawing her enrollment. And it was here, in this toxic corner of the internet, that 4B was born.
The women of WOMAD don’t include trans women or those outside of the gender binary in their brand of feminism. In a conversation on Bluesky with Sarah Tracy*, a Korean American woman [Editor’s note: her name has been changed to protect her privacy], she said, “4B is TERF [trans-exclusionary radical feminists]. At its absolute core it is violently beyond TERF. It is actually systemically TransHateful.”
Tracy, who is cisgender, says that the hatred that WOMAD members direct towards queer and trans women isn’t something that can be easily discarded from 4B for American practitioners. “You CANNOT fix American feminism problems with a Korean hashtag that is problematic at its roots,” Tracy said.
“This is a website with anonymous membership that [has] shared revenge porn, cp [child pornography], harassment campaigns against trans individuals, outed and doxxed gay couples, encouraged queer genocide,” she said.
In South Korea, WOMAD is largely considered a radical form of feminism—outside of the mainstream feminist movement—as participation in 4B results in a “total disconnect” with men. Mira Kim, a Korean American transgender woman explains how this can quickly go awry. “The problem is that it can veer very quickly into feminist separatism, or less charitably, ‘Women Going Their Own Way, mirroring male supremacist ideologies such as MGTOW.”
The Anti-Defamation League explains Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) as “a distinct faction of the “manosphere,” the broad set of male supremacist, anti-feminist, misogynist and sometimes violent extremist movements that exist largely online.” The group aims to remove themselves entirely from “the toxicity of women.”
In South Korea, 4B aims to combat expectations practitioners feel are placed upon them as women in a deeply patriarchal society.
“The Korean formulation doesn’t actually use the word for “men” at all, and the crux of that movement is opposing marriage and childbearing,” Kim said. WOMAD doesn’t consider queer and trans women, who often cannot conceive children in the same way as cis-gender heterosexual women, as a part of their group.
Kim continues, “In a lot of ways (at least in the English translation) everything is about avoiding men.”
She worries that this type of gender-based ideology could slide into gender essentialism, mimicking the same transphobic and homophobic beliefs that guide WOMAD.
On top of all of that, Tracy points out that adopting 4B as an American woman isn’t likely to spark any sort of change. “It’s… inactivism that is a distraction. It’s not actually activism. It’s not doing anything to address 53% of white women who voted for Trump.”
Instead, she suggests that women upset by the election results volunteer at domestic violence shelters and immigration law offices, call their lawmakers, continue to do voter registration and voter education.
Kim shares a similar sentiment.
“Decentering men from your life is a completely understandable thing to do! But that alone won’t solve any problems. Women, femmes, non-binary folk, we take care of ourselves. We need to do work to protect ourselves, to care for ourselves, to help ourselves thrive. We don’t need men, but we don’t need to shun them.”
While 4B may have an attractive elevator pitch, it’s far from the simple fix it appears. Apart from the lack of intersectionality or inclusivity at the 4B movement’s core, boycotting genders was going to save us from the dangers of the next four years. To do that we have to support one another, care for our communities, and perhaps most importantly, listen to those around us willing to share the knowledge we lack.
This article was first posted on News Is Out.