“If They All Had One Throat”
Some of J. K. Rowling’s most vocal supporters believe the phrase is a death threat. Whuh?
by Evan Urquhart
“Why I oughta…” “Take a long walk.” “One of these days!” “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest!” Colorful representations of anger have been with us for a very long time. Parsing them can be difficult, because they’re context dependent. Sometimes they might be a precursor to violence. Other times they may be playful joshing between friends. Often, they’re somewhere in between, an expression of real anger with no intent to translate that into action.
One such turn of phrase has become a subject of outrage among transphobes on the right, after having been employed by trans horror author Gretchen Felker-Martin in a tweet where she expressed anger and grief over the murder of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey. Felker-Martin tweeted that the transphobia of Jesse Singal, Helen Joyce, J. K. Rowling and others contributed to the atmosphere of fear and hatred that led to the murder of the young trans girl. She followed that up by tweeting “if they only had one throat, man.”
This second, subsequently deleted tweet by Felker-Martin has been interpreted as a direct threat to slit J. K. Rowling’s throat by the anti-woke sports blog OutKick and other equally ridiculous nerds.
screenshot from the anti-woke sports blog OutKick
Setting aside how ghoulish it is for OutKick to accuse a trans woman of violence for a tweet in the wake of an actual murder by stabbing of a 16-year-old trans girl, and also setting aside the question of why a sports blog is covering drama between two authors (something that is not traditionally considered a sport), is “If they all had one throat, man” really a clear threat to slit Rowling’s specific threat?
The phrase is certainly intended to evoke the idea of throat-slitting, to be sure. It’s understandable that the author would have quickly deleted it in the heightened environment we find ourselves in. But it’s referring to three named people and multiple unnamed one, and implying that IF all these people had a single throat THEN it would be satisfying to get rid of all of them in one fell swoop.
You could certainly read this phrase as tending to raise tensions, or as carrying the potential that it could encourage someone who was violently inclined. But you could also say that about Rowling’s 2021 tweet where she said “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.” After all, a very well-known tactic to foment violence against a minority is to pick out individual members of that group who have committed crimes and use that to suggest that the minority as a whole are dangerous criminals and need to be stopped by whatever means necessary.
Of course Rowling’s 2021 tweet doesn’t literally threaten violence, but neither does Felker-Martin’s. It makes more sense to read it as a plaintive wish that ending the transphobia that killed Ghey was as simple as slitting a single throat. This is the double standard the right employs to portray a minority in mourning as the violent ones, while an actual child who was murdered due to hate and intolerance is ignored or portrayed as an unfortunate outlier.