The Myth of Neutral Spaces
On the cowardice of being neutral in 2026
Content note: This essay discusses misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ, anti-trans, and anti-immigrant rhetoric, with brief quoted examples for documentation.
Last week, while looking for literary magazines to submit my poems to, I came across New English Review on Chill Subs. I clicked through to NER’s submissions page and read their paragraph-long disclaimer.
“Do NOT submit your preferred pronouns.” “Please read our published work prior to submitting,”
they insisted.
Curious, I headed over to their current issue and pulled up an essay titled “There are Rights and then there are ‘rights’” by Armando Simón.
To tell you that my stomach caved reading it would be an understatement. To say that I felt white-hot rage zap through my spine would be an understatement.
This ghoul-infested article places housing, food, healthcare, clean water, maternity leave, education, asylum, parental rights, animal rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and transgender rights into one sneering heap of “fake rights.”
It clubs these rights into what it calls the “Oppression Olympics,” and uses an ethnic slur while railing against immigration. The author bio at the end identifies Simón as the author of The Transgender Cult: Psychology, Politics, Religion and the Media.
So incensed was I that I went down the sinkhole of articles on this website. It got worse.
The contempt was even more explicit in “Fraudulent Empathy and Tumescent Threats”. It turned feminism, LGBTQ rights, and trans identity into grotesque caricatures. The article uses phrases like “freak, feminist, and rainbow” flags, “shemale warriors,” “fictional…she-males,” and “fake men and/or fake women.”
Belly-churningly, it describes a trans person as a “large angry, predatory XY transvestite sailor.”
In “The Historical Pattern: Totalitarianism and College Students”, feminism is folded into Marxism and the “destruction of the family.” It neatly arranges college students, feminists, leftists, and anti-fascists within a paranoid historical pattern where every demand for equality is a totalitarian takeover.
By the end, the publication pattern of New English Review was abundantly and disgustingly clear to me:
It framed women asking for bodily autonomy as baby-killers. Queer and trans people as symptoms of social decay. Immigrants, an invasion. Students, feminists, and anyone asking for basic dignity were termed totalitarian.
I immediately reached out to Chill Subs and Duotrope, both of which had listed this magazine on their platforms. I shared the above articles as evidence of NER’s dehumanising rhetoric and asked them to de-list the magazine. I also asked them to clarify what policies they have in place for publications that publish hate, slurs, and discriminatory propaganda.
Within a few hours, Chill Subs responded:
I commend them deeply for acting with such urgency and ethical clarity. I’d sent them a long email and had been expecting a pushback (tbh, a generic pacifying AI response), but they responded in the most human way, with genuine shock, empathy and a sincere effort to amend their processes. This is solidarity.
It should not feel rare, but in today’s world, it really is. Kudos to them and their team!
A few hours later, Duotrope responded.
They wrote that they follow US law regarding free speech, and that if a publication’s content is legal under US law, Duotrope will not “censor” it. They said they protect both the publisher’s right to express legal views and the user’s right to decide what they wish to consume or avoid.
Then came the more chilling sentence:
If you have concerns about the actual legality of New English Review’s content, there are organisations you could contact “to begin the due process of silencing a publisher.”
Duotrope, they clarified, was not one of those organisations.
And so, I responded:
I stand by my response.
Could I have been more polite? NO.
Because non-committal, “neutral” platforms like Duotrope enable hate-infested, dehumanising propaganda like New English Review. They provide the stage from which old wounds fester and stink up everything good and decent on this earth.
If that sounds dramatic, consider the historical harm done by neutral spaces. Consider everything that was once legal, and how long it was allowed to continue because people— and more importantly, organisations— hid behind legality.
Neutral spaces are not pleasantly ambient grey areas. Historically, they have been war zones, segregation, border camps. They have been people watching their neighbours being dragged away to concentration camps.
They are courtrooms where women’s bodies are controlled by old men. Hospitals where gender-affirming care is stripped away. Bathrooms where trans people are called predators before they are allowed to be human. Streets where people protecting immigrants— poets, mothers, nurses— are shot dead by the state and buried under “justified force”.
I could go on and on.
Neutral spaces are not grey at all. They are red and red and even more red.
My point is: a thing can be legal and still be dangerous. A thing can be protected speech and still be dehumanising propaganda.
We can never really “silence” anyone who has this much hate and ignorance in their hearts. They exist and have always existed, haunting history books and now dark corners of the internet.
But a platform can refuse to publish, list, recommend, or legitimise their propaganda. An organisation can choose not to become the road by which that propaganda reaches more people.
When a reputed platform refuses to take a stand even for basic human rights, it provides the stage from which those rights— yours, mine, and those of the people we love— can be debated, degraded, and taken away.
Being neutral, that too in 2026, is a cowardly act.
Having no ethical or moral backbone, especially as an organisation, is a red flag.
As Desmond Tutu said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
May more of us question, challenge, and call these spaces out in whatever capacity we can. It’s likely an essay won’t change the world. Heck, it may not even make a dent in Duotrope’s “neutral” policy.
But it records a refusal.
It says: I saw what was being normalised here, and I did not look away.
A/N: Now it’s possible that this essay may escape the perimeter of my 10 followers on Substack, so I urge everyone to be respectful at all times. Hate speech will obviously not be tolerated. This is NOT a neutral space.
I never even heard of the New English Review (whose journal is it, anyway? The KKK? The American Nazi Party? Moms 4 Liberty? Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, publishing and editing pseudonymously?) but it sounds disgusting. And shame on Duotrope for enabling it. Silence is the voice of complicity.
Damn, this sucks. I have several poems with The New English Review, and I had no idea that they posted this kind of rhetoric. Thanks for bringing this to people's attention.