A non-binary tomato walks in to a bar...
(Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
A non-binary tomato walks into a bar — sadly, this ain’t no joke — and heads straight for the toilets. The tomato can’t decide which toilet to use. So walks sadly out into the street, where outside the tomato catches a lemon in the very act of spraying graffiti. Lemon sprays “Tomatoes Ain’t No Fruit” onto a wall. Tomato then springs into action.
Tomato reports lemon to the police! We cut to a slide telling us “REPORT IT. Don’t stay silent about Hate Crime”! Blueberry, wearing a police helmet, says in voiceover, “Reporting makes a difference. By reporting hate crime when it happens you can help stop it happening to someone else. Don’t let someone else’s action dictate who you are”. Yes — it’s Hate Crime Awareness Week. The Devon & Cornwall police are “helping to create an inclusive society”. You can watch the (very short) Tomato / Lemon video here.
We know early on where the cartoon is going. The realisation arrives with a now-familiar sickening thud — you too Devon & Cornwall Police? Tomato carries a card which reveals it isn’t sure about its identity: is it a vegetable or fruit? This causes lettuce and cucumber, who are security guards at the entrance to a nightclub, to laugh mockingly.
When you want to paint some people as victims, you have to paint others as victimisers. I remember a few years back seeing anti-racism advertisements on television. One showed an elderly Asian woman in a sari in her local park. But who’s that coming up behind her? Two rough looking white people. Working class men. Shaved heads. Red necks. Gammons! As Solzhenitsyn said, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them”. However, he continued “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”.
What drives Devon & Cornwall Police to stereotype security guards in this insulting way? People with tough jobs who deal with all sorts of misery and mayhem, but help look after thousands of young people across the nightclubs and pubs of England every Saturday night (pandemics notwithstanding). Who is doing the stereotyping, the “evil othering” here? During Hate Crime Awareness Week no less.
Next. Yes, grafitti is a crime. But this isn’t an anti-grafitti advertisement (if only!). It’s the words that matter. “Tomatoes Ain’t No Fruit”. This is a Hate Crime. Actually, it’s a factual mistake and quite a common one. But Devon & Cornwall Police are keen to tell us that, in this country, something utterly trivial can be reported as a hate crime. The threshold for a hate incident is literally so low that it captures “any non-crime incident which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice against a person”.
You have to link what you report to one of five protected characteristics: race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender status, or disability. It is only your perception that matters. Whatever you report will be logged on police records against the name of the accused. You would think the police would want to keep quiet about these extraordinarily low thresholds for dobbing each other in, so they can focus on serious crime. But now we have them touting for trade! By coincidence, the Law Commission is currently consulting on hate crime legislation, within limited parameters. They are wondering whether terms such as “non-binary” should be added to the protected characteristics and whether “asexual” is an insult? Do tell them what you think.
Back to toilets and the most insidious aspect of this cartoon — Tomato looks like a tomato. A tomato is a fruit. Where is the confusion? As someone put it on twitter “the tomato reads like a veg (man) but in actuality is a fruit (women)”. Yes — Devon & Cornwall Police are wading into the “gender identity” debate — and it’s very clear which side they’re on. (I would be delighted to be corrected.). They say, “Don’t let someone else’s action dictate who you are”. In other words, if you are a man but you feel like a woman, please go right on and be a woman, use the women’s loos and so on! And if a woman complains, report them for hate crime. If someone says “but a biological man ain’t no woman”, you report them for hate crime too. This where we are at.
Many people who watch these things believe we are reaching a dangerous place in this country. Gender ideology — the idea that your inner sense of yourself trumps biological reality — is gaining traction. You see it across our public institutions. The NHS allows men to self-identify and enter women’s wards. The Prison service houses men in women’s prisons. The 2021 Census will allow people to not just provide information on their “gender identity” but also to self-declare their actual biological sex.
If sex, why not ethnicity, age, address? Where’s the logic? Who benefits? What is the point of the Census? Lived experience? In the painful final chapters of 1984, O’Brien says, “But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” This is where we are heading. “I think therefore I am” is becoming: “Whatever I think, I am”. And everyone else must validate that — or be accused of hate crime.
How is this going to work? We cannot validate each other’s internal realities all the time. What happens when they contradict one another and when we no longer base our societies in shared understanding of external reality? Of course Orwell also foresaw the only way this can work. Some people’s internal realities will become more important than others. Power wins. Prevailing orthodoxy wins. All else is Hate Crime, Wrongthink.
We can’t let this happen. Blueberry, in the Devon & Cornwall Police cartoon, tells us “reporting makes a difference”. Blueberry is right. Tell the Devon & Cornwall Police, the Law Commission, your MP, the Minister for Women and Equalities, what you think.
