From the New International Version
Genesis 11, 1- 9
(1) Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. (2) As people moved eastward they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. (3) They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. (4) Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” (5) But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. (6) The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. (7) Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” (8) So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. (9) That is why it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
Something another poster said reminded me of this story. Every marginalised group has progressed it's liberation through unity. Women together make up half the population. If we rose up and stood together we would be unstoppable. We've made so many gains over the last century, found so much strength in each other, Feminism has achieved so much. And men saw this, and they thought “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” And they did it. Now our movement is divided, our language is confused, we talk past each other in debates, and if the backlash proceeds as desired we won't even be able to recognise ourselves as a class any more. We will just be a collection of cervix havers and pregnant people and menstruators, with nothing to unify us into anything stronger than a thousand tiny groups.
I propose that this assault on women's language is a modern day Tower of Babel story, and that the destruction of language to prevent people unifying to challenge power, is literally be the oldest trick in the book. We need to keep building our city, we need to keep fighting for our language, but most importantly we need to find a way to communicate properly with the other women we've become divided from.