From One Fucking Bitch to Another

These two words made Renee Nicole Good’s murder undeniable

Any debate about the murder of Renee Nicole Good should have ended the moment we heard these two words: “fucking bitch.” ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot a woman in the head, killed her, and then called her a fucking bitch.

How many women have died with those same words ringing in their ears? More than a few. How many of us have been called a fucking bitch in the exact tone of voice Ross used—dripping with disdain and dehumanization? Probably all of us.

I was already having a hard time sleeping, thinking about the stuffies pouring out of Good’s glove compartment and her wife’s pained voice. I was already angry. Now, I’m apoplectic. So let’s be clear: those words made an already-obvious murder undeniable. Men don’t call a woman a fucking bitch when they’re afraid for their lives—they say it when they hate us. They say it when they’re punishing us.

And that’s exactly what Ross was doing to Good: he was punishing her. What the transgression was, we’ll never really know. Maybe it was because Good tried to drive off, or because she wouldn’t get out of her car. My guess—given those two very telling words—is that Ross was triggered by Good’s wife, who said, “show your face, big boy,” and “go get yourself some lunch, big boy.”

Men who call women fucking bitches don’t much like it when women talk back. They especially don’t like it when women remind them who they really are: small, pathetic, cowardly. What’s that Margaret Atwood quote? “Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them.”

The murder of Renee Nicole Good didn’t stop in Minnesota, though. Conservatives have been killing her every day since—smearing this wife and mother’s name in an attempt to prove that she was, in fact, a total fucking bitch.

Since her murder, conservatives have pushed out viral misinformation calling Good a known child abuser—as if the ICE officer who shot her in the face could somehow intuit that she was a ‘bad’ person. People even shared faked police records. The truth, of course, is that the 37-year-old was never accused or arrested for child abuse.

At Fox News, pundit Jesse Watters mocked Good on air as a “self-proclaimed poet from Colorado with pronouns in her bio.” Does Watters believe every liberal he finds annoying should be executed—or just Good?

But it’s been the attack on her child’s school that’s put me over the edge. Right-wing media outlets and influencers found the kindergarten where Good sent her 6-year-old, ’revealing’ its commitment to “social justice.” Apparently the term itself is evidence of violent left-wing extremism.

One TikToker called the school an “activism factory disguised as education.” The Washington Examiner, blasting the left’s “thirst for violence,” highlighted language from the school’s website that says they help “students understand history and their role in making the world a better place.” And the New York Post decided it was newsworthy that students are taught about “aboriginal issues.”

It’s not just right-wing grifters: CNN published a piece yesterday about Good’s “connection to efforts to monitor and potentially disrupt ICE operations.” The connection? She sat on the school’s board, which once shared a document with parents on how they could get involved with protecting their neighbors from ICE. CNN breathlessly reported Good’s “leadership role at the school has not been previously reported,” and that she was “deeply involved with the school community [and] regularly attended board meetings.”

Yeah, what a fucking bitch.

This is what we’re meant to believe made Good a dangerous domestic terrorist who deserved to be killed in front of her wife? That she regularly attended school board meetings? That she believed people shouldn’t be snatched off the street by anonymous men in masks?

I also don’t want to see my neighbors kidnapped, and I also send my child to a school that openly values social justice. Do I also deserve to be shot in the face? Here’s the problem: I already know conservatives’ answer.

That’s what all this coverage and right-wing backlash is ultimately getting at—that we deserve to die. That for the crime of resisting, or having pronouns in our bios, we should be shot. That for being women, or having a wife—or for caring about the people in our communities regardless of their immigration status—we should just go ahead and die. That’s the barely-shrouded message in every bit of coverage suggesting Good is an ‘activist’, or that she wrongly resisted ICE.

It’s not that I’m surprised: this is a violent country, and this government is already killing us. Today we learned about another woman murdered by an abortion ban—a mother in North Carolina. People are dying because of Republican Medicaid cuts, because of the administration’s attacks on immigrants, and because of police violence. This time, though, the government did their killing out in the open—in daylight and without shame.

Back in 2020, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave a floor speech after Republican Rep. Ted Yoho called her a “fucking bitch.” She said, “this issue is not about one incident, it is cultural.”

“It is a culture of lack of impunity, of accepting of violence and violent language against women, an entire structure of power that supports that...dehumanizing language is not new and what we are seeing is that incidents like these are happening in a pattern. This is a pattern of an attitude towards women and dehumanization of others.”

Over five years later, that pattern is still here—and it’s still deadly. And I hope that the women aligning themselves with this administration understand that no matter what, we are all fucking bitches to them.

So from one fucking bitch to another, let’s say it plainly: We know what happened to Renee Nicole Good. We know what those words meant.

We know he murdered her.