One conspicuous group, meanwhile, embraced the psychological implications of the term: Criminal defendants who claimed that upon coming into close contact with a gay person, they were so overwhelmed by ‘‘gay panic’’ that they assaulted or murdered them. It wasn’t until 2014 that California officially banished gay and transgender ‘‘panic’’ defenses from its courtrooms. In 2012, The Associated Press banned ‘‘social and political’’ ‘‘-phobia’’ constructions, including ‘‘homophobia’’ and ‘‘Islamophobia,’’ from its stylebook, declaring them too charged for use in objective reporting. ‘‘Homophobia’’ is ‘‘just off the mark,’’ Dave Minthorn, then deputy standards editor at The A.P., told Politico. ‘‘It’s ascribing a mental disability to someone and suggests a knowledge that we don’t have. It seems inaccurate.’’

Bigotry is an emotionally charged phenomenon, and a persistent critique of the political ‘‘-phobia’’ is that it’s hooked on the wrong feeling. Anti-gay rhetoric and hate crimes often seem ‘‘more consistent with the emotion of anger than fear,’’ Herek wrote in 2004. Both emotions cozy up in our nervous systems — think of the fight-or-flight response — but culturally, fear and anger register as two very different social responses, especially in men. We cower before an angry man but laugh at a frightened one. One reason ‘‘homophobia’’ was such a provocative neologism was its somewhat trollish imputation that the person who holds anti-gay beliefs is pathetically scared of gay people. Weinberg’s alpha-male patients, you assume, would be significantly more comfortable with a diagnosis of hating gays than of fearing them.

Antagonizing your ideological opponent is built into the ‘‘-phobia’’ frame, and activists have sparred over whether that catalyzes progress or impedes it. Robin Richardson, an activist who edited the influential 1997 report on Islamophobia published by the Runnymede Trust, a British race-equality think tank, later revisited the term he helped popularize: ‘‘To accuse someone of being insane or irrational is to be abusive and, not surprisingly, to make them defensive and defiant,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Reflective dialogue with them is then all but impossible.’’

Fostering reflective dialogue is one way to go about advancing an agenda. Shaming your ideological opponents into silence is another. That strategy plays particularly powerfully on Twitter, where the one-liner with the most retweets wins the debate round. And just as counting up likes and retweets lends a mathematical sheen to the Twitter contest, the ‘‘-phobia’’ suffix carries with it an air of scientific authority. Adopting the language of the medical establishment imparts a bit of linguistic legitimacy to the activist underdog’s cause. Now it lends social legitimacy, too. A copycat neologism (like ‘‘fatphobic’’) automatically conjures a comparison between a struggling cause (like fat acceptance) and the overwhelmingly successful gay rights movement. The Jezebel flap over ‘‘whorephobia’’ was emblematic: Jezebel staff members denied that they were motivated by fear, and their critics countered that that is just what a homophobe would say. As one put it, ‘‘The ‘actually I’m not scared of ’ response to ‘phobia’ accusations is a real telltale sign of bigotry.’’

Medical models have long served as metaphors for the spread of cultural ideas. ‘‘Xenophobia is a disease more dangerous to a free people than a physical plague,’’ reads a 1923 New York Times editorial against the Ku Klux Klan. The paper called for ‘‘a political Pasteur’’ who could ‘‘isolate and destroy the germ which shows itself in the indiscriminate hatred of other nationals or other races.’’ Nowadays, we pathologize ideas with talk of memes that mutate from host to host and information that reaches a critical mass by ‘‘going viral.’’ It’s a powerful trope, but it also risks trading one stigma for another: ‘‘Phobia’’ is now so embedded in our language that it’s easy to forget that it is a metaphor comparing bigots to the mentally ill. The comparison also has the effect of excusing those Americans — like certain presidential candidates in the 2016 race — who wield prejudices strategically. It’s not your fault if you get sick. But hating people is a choice.