If anyone is curious about how 4B movement actually went in the end, here’s the first hand report from a South Korean trans woman who has been DIRECTLY participating in radical feminist community. 🧵

I’ve been a member of WOMAD from 2016 to 2017, when this radical feminist online community was operated semi-anonymously. WOMAD was the forum where 4B movement acutally stemmed from, and this forum origianlly employed membership system, before it migrated into a completely different website which operated in a fully anonymous board system.

I was also active in second WOMAD for a short amout of time but only partially, and left soon because the nature of the community changed so fundamentally (of course, in a bad way). This thread is going to focus on this change between the first WOMAD  and secon WOMAD.

First WOMAD had it’s own venom (i.e. homophobia, racism, etc.), but wasn’t particularly transphobic or showing hatred toward sex workers. This was possible due to the strict regulation by the moderators. The one of the primary rules applied to the entire forum was not to discuss anything political outside feminism. The moderation wasn’t perfect (that’s why the homophobia and racism persisted) but still at least succeded to prevent the transphobia and hatred toward sex workers from spreading (it particularly stopeed the development of the hateful rhetorics disguised as a discussion, like the usual ones, “all these ‘transgender’ things, aren’t they actually harmful to women, in the end?”, “do we really need to defend or even care about so-called ‘sex workers’ when they are fundamentally reactionary and harmful to normal majority of women?”, etc.). I could even participate in OFFLINE protest without huge problems. After the protest, someone posted something like, “one of the participants has suspicious voice”, on the forum and I replied, “sorry for the inconvinience, I am a trans woman, I also really hate my voice”, to that post. And like, the majority, at least 70 percent of the reactions to my reply were positive, and only other 30 percent were negative. But even those negative reactions were not really straightforward hateful comments against me (just something like “i don’t get it”, or “still kinda uncomfortable” kinda things). Moreover, other members actually FOUGHT against those negative reactions in the comment sections (I know. UNBELIEVABLE to the today’s standard).
I was also one of the top active member in the first WOMAD community. Many of my posts appeard on the front page of the forum. I even gathered an offline feminist study group for myself independently. No one batted an eye to my identity. I could participate without any major hinderances.

4. The problem started when the head administrator of the forum got doxxed. She was suspected to have ties to a real life leftist political party in South Korea, and soon stood down from her position. This was the moment the migration to second WOMAD website began. The new moderators of the website didn’t regulate any political discussions. In the blink of an eye, this radical feminist community totally shifted its position to alt-right.

5. As far as I can speculate, the original administrator’s political position was what not only prevented the major hatred from spreading, but also defended the community from alt-right infiltrations. From here, I think the fact that adamant transphobia that got possible would be kinda pretty obvious and don’t need any further explanation. There WERE active alt-right infiltrators spreading not only transphobia or any other kinds of hatred but also literal conspiracy theories and misinformations about real life South Korean political landscape (I will not delve further into this, since it’s whole another story, but let me just say it was just something on the level of average QAnon bs). In previous WOMAD, the post that tried to start an argument about which South Korean political party they should align themselves to surely would’ve got banned. The second WOMAD board on the other hand, they could just blatantly post, “actually I think our conservative party cares more about women’s rights than the liberals”.
I mean, it was still an anonymous board, so I could surely participate in this new website if I wanted to (without mentioning my identity or discussing any topics about trans, of course), but I didn’t see any use of that since the level of the discussion in the board got SO low. They were unironically discussing whether the recent trend of chinese cuisines in South Korea was communist infiltration or not.

So the conclusion is,

Is 4B movement inherently transphobic?

No. Is radical feminism incomparable with trans individuals? I don’t think so. I could participate in all these activities without serious exclusions in the first period of WOMAD.

2. Is 4B movement prone to transphobia?

Yes, it is. 4B movement not only have an innate possibility to adopt transphobia for it’s own main agenda, but is really vulnerable to alt-right tendencies.

In second WOMAD I witnessed the exact same person who posted her suspicion about my voice made a comeback post, saying, “I’m glad you guys got your common sense back. When I pointed out this tranny and you guys were not having my back, I felt like me, a real woman was being replaced by some kind of bodysnatcher.”

3. Does it mean 4B movement should not be tried?

Not at all. But this entire thread is a warning for the ones who are newly trying to adopt this movement. The lesson here is that this movement is very precarious and CAN be turned into something really dangerous. The transphobia in South Korea never been this serious right now. And the current state of 4B movement? They literally turned themselves into the ‘feminist’ version of crypto bros. They seriously think women’s liberation will be possible through the stock markets. I’m not joking at all. Their capitalist belief is now inseparable from the Elon Musk bootlickers. Very recently one of the pioneering gurus from the 4B movment opened a PAID offline lesson for “how to win in online arguments”.
And yeah, no one actually take 4B movement seriously outside of internet spaces currently. But the rampant transphobia remained and penetrated into the feminist discussion very substantially in a popular level.

So, please beware while attempting to adopt this movement. Proper moderation will be what’s most important. Always be cautious of the movement’s current direction. You can be radicalized into far right in a matter of second if you don’t be careful. That’s all what I’m asking.

ps. I saw some people saying things like “US people need a ‘different lens’ when they consider the phenomenon in South Korea and I dare say if you seriously think you need ‘different lens’ to analyse us, you are absolutely being orientalist here. We are just a worse version of you guys, in a capitalist sense, a cultural sense, and also a feminist sense. We imported Andrea Dworkin, Susan Faludi, but ALSO Sheila Jeffreys and Catharine MacKinnon.