A Queer Life Is A Human Life

The murder of Renee Good

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A portrait of Renee Good painted by the artist Noval Noir

Within hours of her murder by ICE agents in Minneapolis and mere minutes of her identity being publicly reported, the most ghoulish figures in American politics set about diminishing the value of Renee Good’s life. Trump administration officials falsely dismissed her as a “domestic terrorist” who they also falsely claimed “violently, willfully, and maliciously ran over an ICE officer” and thus her murder was, in the words of Vice President J.D. Vance, “a tragedy of her own making.” Their acolytes on television and online wrote Good off as merely another liberal white woman “with pronouns in her bio” who “leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage.” The ICE officer who shot and killed Renee Good described her as a “fucking bitch” mere seconds after shooting her three times in the face.

Good’s wife, Becca Good, said in a statement to Minnesota Public Radio “Renee lived by an overarching belief: there is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow.” Good’s mother said “She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate.” Good, an award-winning poet, was described by a former professor as “incredibly warm with her peers, generous with their work, and was just a bright and engaging presence that made folks feel good.”

Those who wished to diminish, or even celebrate, Good’s murder are galling in their moral depravity, their unmitigated eagerness to lie about the circumstances of her death, and their desperation to turn an avoidable tragedy into yet another gleeful spectacle of shared enemies and open cruelty. Few have been as visible in this display as Vice President J.D. Vance, who, from the White House briefing room to his obnoxious presence on social media, has devoted hours and hours to lecturing the American people on why Renee Good simply deserved to die. Vance has elected to make himself the face of Good’s murder in part, I believe, because Good’s life—full of creative ambition, love lost and gained, and queer freedom—is anathema to Vance’s own narrow, rigid gender ideology. The goal of devaluing her life is consistent with his transparently psychosexual and coercive natalist politics and his frequent jeremiads about the breakdown of the patriarchal family. Vance’s target audience—the only audience capable of looking past his mealy-mouthed distortions and middle-management comportment—is bitter, terrified men delighted by any opportunity to enact revenge on a mythical gynocracy.

Let’s remember, after all, this is the same J.D. Vance who infamously warned of a society run by “childless cat ladies” who are “miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made” and want “to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Vance has previously proposed that people with children should get twice the voting power. His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, could be read as the Moynihan Report of the white working class, blaming his family’s plight and pathologies not on systemic causes but on missing paternal authority and dominance. Alongside his Big Tech sponsors like Peter Thiel, Vance voraciously clamored for American women to have more children while supporting the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, with the Trump administration occasionally gesturing at carrots like baby bonds but largely relying on punitive measures against female professionals and social engineering designed to “masculinize” the American workforce. Vance criticized no-fault divorce, telling a group of Christian high school students in 2021:

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear…maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages. And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”

The ex-wife—defiant of a patriarchal dominance Vance and many conservatives assume to be their birthright—looms large as a figure of deviance and degeneracy. Regardless of the circumstances of her past and present marriage, Good has been cast as yet another defiant, entitled woman in part because what little we know of her life course suggests she benefited from the gains of feminists and queer rights as the ex-wife of a man, the wife of another woman. the queer mother of three children, and an accomplished poet. These facts alone are enough in the eyes of Vance’s or Watters’ audience to cast her as the byproduct of social changes which, they’ve assured their audience, are the source of their dispossession.

One could describe the United States in 2026 as a country of ex-wives ruled by a confederacy of aggrieved ex-husbands. mostly (but not entirely) men convinced they have been robbed of their masculine authority and restrained by the demands of others for equality and dignity, be they women like Good or the immigrants she and her wife were trying to defend from state violence. What Trump, Vance, and their acolytes promise is a return to the rule of power, a restoration of a mythical past in which might made right and challenges to that might were justly put down. Stephen Miller put it succinctly in a response to CNN’s Jake Tapper about whether the administration—following its disastrously brazen kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro—would make good on Trump’s many promises to capture Greenland:

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time…We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”

Though meant as a description of its foreign policy, it’s an apt description of the administration’s domestic policy. From its militarizing of American cities to its terrorizing of immigrant communities to its eugenic demolition of public health and public services, the Trump administration’s defining belief is in the inherent righteousness of the powerful over the weak. From this perspective, the do-good mentality of both liberals and the redistributive politics of the left are a perversion of an order that is presumed to be good and pure because it is natural, biological, or ordained by God. The crowds that stormed the Capitol on January 6 were wrongfully persecuted in the eyes of the administration because they were defending this order; Renee Good is being cast as guilty not because of the direction of her car tires or he state of mind of the ICE officer who killed her, but because she defied that order.

She defied that order when she and her wife stopped on that street to show solidarity with her immigrant neighbors. She defied that order when she pursued a life of her own, a creative life, outside of but not exclusive to her role as a mother. And she defied that order in the ways so many of us do, following the queer passions and loves too complex to be contained in the tiny little boxes of matrimony and subservience people like JD Vance want to lock us in. If the world is truly governed only by force and power, then a life built on the qualities mourned by Good’s wife and loved ones—kindness, queer love, and poetry—is a structural threat to the state’s authority. Every such life, every queer life, exposes those “iron laws” as not the natural order of the world, but the desperate impositions of men who fear any freedom they cannot control.