The Rise of the 4B Movement Post-USA Election and How it’s Transphobic

Since the election of Donald Trump in the USA, there’s been a resurgence of the 4B movement online. From Wikipedia:

4B (or “Four Nos”) is a gender critical, radical feminist movement. It first emerged during the South Korean gender wars during the mid-to-late 2010s on the misandric website Womad and related subcultures on Twitter.

The name refers to its defining four tenets which all start with the Korean bi 비, roughly meaning no. Its proponents refuse to date, get married, have sex, or have children with cisgender men or transgender women. Members affirm gender essentialism and oppose transgender rights movements, seeing them as furthering the oppression and domination of women and maintenance of patriarchal societies.

The movement to decenter men does not need to be transphobic. Three out of the “Four Nos” can be practiced in solidarity with cisgender women. The 4B movement focuses entirely on a rebranded version of political lesbianism. This version depends on bioessentialism/gender essentialism. It has right wing conservative ideology at the root of the movement.

The 4B movement predominantly sees transgender rights movements as incompatible with feminism. Developing out of transgender-exclusionary radical feminism (T.E.R.F.), the movement holds to gender-critical views on sex and gender, supporting gender essentialism and the exclusion of transgender women from feminist spaces. Advocates of 4B are opposed to what they call “gender ideology” (젠더론x) and promote excluding transgender women from feminist spaces, as well as romantic or sexual relationships with them (트젠 안사요). In South Korea, members of the 4B have created gatherings exclusively for what they call “biological females” and “real women”.

In the context of the current moment, it doesn’t make any sense. Women are already doing much of what the 4B movement calls for, but for different reasons.

There’s not one particular reason why fertility rates are on the decline in the US, said Sarah Hayford, director of the Institute for Population Research at The Ohio State University. A number of social and economic factors are probably coming into play, she said.

A “package of demographic changes” – people getting married later and less often, spending more years in school and taking longer to get economically established in a steady job, to name a few – align with birth rate trends, said Hayford, who was not involved in the new report.

“People are waiting to have children. And on average, when people wait longer to have children, they end up having fewer children,” she said. “I think there’s also greater social acceptance of not having children or having a smaller family. So as that has become more acceptable, people are more carefully weighing their decision to become parents.” – US fertility rate dropped to record low in 2023, CDC data shows

Lastly, trying to frame the election of Donald Trump to the President of the United States as a betrayal of men against women ignores:

that the problem isn’t with men, but with white men AND white women. The 4B movement ignores what an integral part that white supremacy had in electing Trump. If a protest movement against him is to be effective, it must delve deep. It must address the root of the problem that is white supremacy.