There is no loss to good men from measures to protect women from bad - Euan McColm

The crimes committed against Gisèle Pelicot were so horrific that words of praise for her fortitude seem like platitudes.

The 71-year-old from Provence has become a feminist icon after waiving her right to anonymity during the trial of 51 men - including her former husband, Dominique - accused of raping her while she was drugged and unconscious.

Each day, Pelicot walks into the court house in Avignon past crowds of applauding supporters. She smiles as she acknowledges them. Sometimes, she accepts a bunch of flowers from a stranger.

To describe Pelicot as brave doesn’t begin to capture the enormity of what she’s now doing. She’s an inspiration to victims and a living warning to perpetrators.

While I’m filled with admiration for Pelicot, engaging with the details of the ongoing case provokes another profound feeling: shame.

What man could look at a queue of defendants, many of them concealing their faces with scarves or balaclavas, snaking out of the court building without feeling the same?

After all, the men on trial for raping Pelicot are men like me.

I don’t mean that I share their depravity; I’m repulsed by the crimes of which they’re accused. But they are - like me - apparently normal men. They’re husbands and fathers with normal lives and normal jobs. And I’m certain most of them behaved normally for years until suddenly, horrifically, they did not.

The danger women face from men is a touchy subject. When it’s raised in public, we commonly hear the “not all men” defence. Many men prefer to make clear their own decency than to engage in a difficult discussion about violence against women.

Men should be braver. One needn’t feel any compulsion to attack or abuse women to have some insight into how this happens. At the very least, we should be able to recognise the power imbalance between the sexes and to understand how that can be used by predatory men.

Last week, Pelicot took the stand in court and responded to evidence heard, so far, during a trial expected to last until December. She said that, over previous weeks, she’d heard a number of women - the wives, mothers, and sisters of defendants - give evidence on behalf of “exceptional men”.

“That,” added Pelicot, “is just like who I had back home.”

The trial of those accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot reminds us that, while it might not be “all men”, it is always men and they’re all different. And they look just like the ones who aren’t dangerous.

This simple truth should, I think, be enough to compel all men to support the provision of single-sex safe spaces for women. There is no loss to good men from measures to protect women from bad men. And, even if there were, good men would wish to bear it.

Yet, right now in Scotland, many of our politicians want to give away women’s right to spaces from which men are excluded. Support for reform of the Gender Recognition Act remains high, despite the Scottish Government’s botched attempt to allow anyone to self-identify into the legally recognised sex of their choosing.

This obsession among the current political class with gender ideology means that major public bodies don’t have coherent policies on single sex spaces because they are unable to say what a woman is.

It should not be considered normal that this is so. Politicians should be speaking up about the black farce that is Rape Crisis Scotland’s ongoing project to find and agree a definition of the word “woman”.

Perhaps MSPs will be encouraged by the decision, announced last week, of Glasgow and Clyde Rape Crisis to cut ties with the national charity.

In a statement, management at GCRC said they had disaffiliated from Rape Crisis Scotland because they want to provide a single-sex service staffed by an “all-female workforce”. This entirely reasonable - indeed, necessary - objective was “at odds” with the policy of RCS.

The decision of GCRC to break away from RCS comes after scandal engulfed another centre. An independent review of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre found it failed to provide women-only services and that its, now departed chief executive, trans woman Mridul Wadhwa had not acted professionally or understood the limits of her authority.

Former ERCC worker Roz Adams was recently awarded £35,000 in compensation after being forced out of her position during what the review described as a "heresy hunt" under Wadhwa’s regime. Adams’s “crime” was to say she believed rape victims accessing the service were entitled to know the biological sex of staff with whom they were dealing.

Adams now works at Beira’s Place, a women-only rape support service serving Edinburgh and the Lothians.

Until the announcement from GCRC, Beira’s Place - established and funded by the writer and philanthropist JK Rowling - was the only rape support centre in Scotland offering services provided solely by and to those born female.

The chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, Sandy Brindley, remains in position despite her previous endorsement of Wadhwa and her continuing support for the use of rape crisis centres by those who “identify” as women.

A statement issued by Rape Crisis Scotland after GCRC’s decision to break loose shows just how morally and intellectually lost the organisation has become under Brindley’s leadership.

“All Rape Crisis centres,” a spokesperson said, “must provide women-only spaces within their service but how they define this is currently for individual centres to decide.”

The idea that staff of rape support centres should “decide” who is a woman is nonsensical.

Women need safe spaces based on sex rather than identity not because all men are a danger but because it is not at all easy, no matter how he dresses or styles or his hair, to tell the bad ones from the good.

The queue of men accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot surely underlines that terrible truth, doesn’t it?