The First Minister said she understood some people had “sincerely held concerns”, and insisted the changes would not remove any legal protections women currently had.
Interesting to note that "some people" has risen from around a third of all submissions to the first consultation to just under half this time (and that was many more responses).
And "some people" also includes the vast majority of women's groups who opposed the proposed changes to the GRA.
As for the changes not removing protections, even trans rights campaigners believe it would (namely those like Law Professor Alex Sharpe who argued that males with a GRC cannot be excluded from female-only spaces for any reason).
And the FM's feeble claim has been resoundly rejected by a number of legal experts as well as frontline workers and women's rights campaigners. With evidence of places where these proposals were enshrined in law and where it became clear that the legal protections women had, had in practice and sometimes in law been removed by enshrining self-id in law.
There's a part of me that wishes she would just own it. She's decided that there's a group worthier of protection than women and girls and that's that. It doesn't matter what anyone else says, she will do this and thereby elevate Scotland into the ranks of the few countries in the world that have enshrined the doctrine of gender identity in law by allowing self-determination of legal sex.