CNN tweeted out some medical advice: “Individuals with a cervix are now recommended to start cervical cancer screening at 25 and continue through age 65.”

Individuals with cervixes. If this seems a peculiar locution, using nine syllables where the time-tested two phonemes known as “women” might suffice, that’s because you don’t know. You just don’t know. Really. It’s 2020. Men can have cervixes.

You might ask: Am I understanding the word correctly? I thought it was a reference to female anatomy, but is this . . . some French cooking term? Our chefs choose the freshest cervixes from lakes fed by artisan springs, and sauté them to perfection.

No, it’s what you think. Cervixes, as in the female reproductive thingamabob, to use the technical terms. They can’t say “women” because half of Twitter — that is, a statistically meaningless percentage of the American population who spend their days like Rumpelstiltskin, ripping themselves apart in fury — would send the winged monkeys to attack anyone who said men can’t have cervixes.

“I’m confused,” you say.

Yes; that’s understandable.

“No, I mean is Rumpelstiltskin a winged monkey? I feel like you didn’t make that clear.”

Rumpelstiltskin is not a winged monkey, but it is possible that a winged monkey is his spirit animal. Why, he might — uh oh, hold on, be right back.

(Brief pause; hum the Jeopardy! theme if you like . . .)

Okay, that’s weird. This issue hasn’t even gone to press yet and I’m already canceled on Twitter for appropriating the Indigenous concept of a spirit animal. I apologize, and if that line makes it into print I will visit every subscriber to remove the line with a Sharpie.

Back to our point: If you say that men cannot have cervixes, and women cannot, or perhaps ought not, have penises, then you are transphobic. The particulars of that issue we won’t bother with here, because I’ve no desire to stir the hornet’s nest of Rumple-monkeys —

“Hold on, they’re insects now?”

Yes. They are wingless Rumple-monkeys but they believe they have wings, and so we must agree that this is so, and celebrate it with children’s hour at the local library, where Rumple-monkeys with homemade wings read stories to toddlers. Stop interrupting. My actual point is that the term “transphobia” is nonsense, and joins a long and dishonest parade of slurs that equate disagreement with mental illness.

Islamophobia was the first, of course. A convenient way to shut down an observation. If you said, “Gosh, a lot of these chaps blowing themselves up seem to share a particular theological interpretation; might want to look into that,” “Islamophobia!” would be the instant accusation.

“What?” you’d say. “No, not at all.”

“No, Islamophobia! Pure and simple doubleplus ungood phobic!”

“Like arachnophobia, the fear of spiders? Ack, there’s bin Laden crouched in the corner of the ceiling! Get a broom!”

Please. A phobia is an irrational fear of something. It is frequently manifested by physical reactions, such as rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms, light-headedness, and a desire to remove oneself from the source of anxiety. Common treatments include careful, controlled exposure to achieve desensitization. Dislike for al-Qaeda’s view of Koranic requirements cannot be overcome by sitting in a room listening to soothing pan flutes while a copy of the Koran sits on a table six feet away.

The therapist speaks: “Okay, now touch the Koran, and tell me how you feel.”

“Dizzy. Scared. Like I really need to breathe in a bag while someone tells me the positive accomplishments of Islam, like math and astronomy.”

Yeah, no. Disagreement with a particular doctrine is not fear, any more than it’s “fragility” to be irritated when told that your skin color is an irredeemable sin. Stigmatizing the possession of a contrary opinion as a mental disorder is downright Soviet. Only a madman, the psych-ward commissars would say, rejects scientific socialism! We must send you to the asylum and inject you with turpentine.

“Wait, I just said that Marx’s belief that the state would wither away did not seem to be borne out by –”

“TURPENTINE.”

Why don’t conservative rhetoricians adopt this technique? Several reasons. One: Whenever you turn the Left’s rhetoric against them, they have a mental short-circuit. DOES NOT COMPUTE. Smoke curls from their collar. If the enemies of the Left are defined by a Bad Thing, then the Left cannot by definition be accused of that Bad Thing. Example: The Left says racists on the right want to divide people by skin color. The Right notes that the Left wants to divide people by skin color. The Left is furious you don’t see the difference.

Two: They are phobic. If you accuse someone of hating the Second Amendment, of being riflephobic, they’ll say heck yeah: Guns, and all they imply, scare them. They should scare anyone! Why, if you’re not riflephobic, you have a mental disorder.

Three: The issues of conservatism do not sound euphonious in the -phobia construct. Hate the 2A? You’re . . . self-defense-o-phobic! Want more progressive taxes? You’re . . . anti-equal-rates-with-rising-revenue-from-increased-economic-activity phobic!

If you scoff at the very idea of equating dissent with unreasoning panic, you are phobicphobic. You have an irrational fear of being accused of having an irrational fear. The only defense? Accuse the accuser of being phobicphobicphobic.

It may not convince them, but while they are toting up the phobes to figure out what you mean, you can leave undetected and go on with normal life. Ah, but what hidden biases lurk in that word, normal?

Oh, shut up. Hmm: Could have led with that and saved us all 900 words.