Our Independence

Independence is not a claim a publication can make about itself. It is a set of facts a reader can check. Here are ours.

Who funds this

Eden Openly takes no money from anyone. No advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate links, no grants, no institutional funding, no donations, no paywall. We accept no payment, gifts, products or hospitality from any organisation whose work we cover. The publication is financed entirely by its author.

We will not introduce any of these, and everything we publish will remain free to read.

That refusal includes organisations we agree with. We take no funding from pharmaceutical companies, private clinics or laboratories, and none from advocacy organisations, campaign groups or charities working in trans healthcare. Independence that runs in only one direction is not independence.

Who writes this

Eden Openly is written and edited by one person: a dermatologist who is also a transgender woman. Where these pages say “we,” that means the author, together with anyone who has contributed to a specific piece and is named at the foot of it.

The author writes under her legal first name, Eden, and does not publish her surname. This is a deliberate decision, for two reasons. Her full name is unique, and working openly in transgender health carries real personal risk in some of the countries where she lives, works and travels. And it protects family members who have not chosen any of this. The decision applies to identity, not to method. Nothing we publish asks you to take the author’s word for anything: every substantive claim is sourced to material you can read yourself, her published work is linked to her ORCID record (0009-0001-2205-5702), and the standards we work to are published in full. Where the law requires a full legal name, for an institutional filing or a statutory request, she gives it. If a piece cannot be checked without trusting us, it has failed.

What we have a stake in

We think undeclared interests are the problem, not interests themselves. So here are ours.

The author is a transgender woman receiving hormone therapy, and therefore has a personal stake in much of what this publication covers. The author also founds and funds non-profit organisations working in trans healthcare and research, has taken public positions before Parliament and a public health body on decisions we have written about, and co-owns a commercial skincare business, with a general aesthetic hospital planned.

Every interest is listed, with the date it began, in our register of declared interests. The register is the definitive list; this page sets out the policy.

Apart from the commercial interest at item (h) of the register, none of these relationships are commercial, and the author takes no salary, fee or benefit from any of the others. But they are all interests, and a reader assessing our work is entitled to know they exist.

Where a piece bears directly on one of them, we say so in the piece itself.

What our evidence reviews are — and are not

Our evidence reviews are conducted to a published method, applied consistently, and documented so that another person could repeat them. They are not peer-reviewed journal articles, and we do not present them as such. They are self-published work, carried out to a standard we have written down in advance and against which we can be held.

We think that is worth more than an unexamined appeal to peer review, and rather less than a properly refereed publication. We would rather state the position plainly than let the format imply something it hasn’t earned.

How we reach conclusions

We start from the evidence and follow it, including when it leads somewhere we would rather it didn’t. Where evidence is weak, we say it is weak. Where a question is genuinely unresolved, we say so rather than choosing the answer we prefer. Where a conclusion requires interpretation, we show the reasoning so you can disagree with it.

A publication that never reports an inconvenient finding is not reporting.

When we are wrong

We correct in public. Corrections are dated, state what was wrong, and remain attached to the original piece. We do not amend quietly and we do not delete.

We also track errors in the primary literature and record whether they have been corrected, because an uncorrected error keeps being cited long after it is known to be wrong.

Right of reply

If we have written about you, your organisation or your work and you believe we have got something wrong, tell us. We will look at it, correct what needs correcting, and publish your response alongside the piece if you want it published. This applies whether or not we agree with you.

What you can check

Our Editorial Standard, our method for evaluating evidence and our Corrections Policy are published in full. Sources are cited so you can read them yourself. If you cannot verify something we have said, that is our failure, and we would like to hear about it.