The nomeclature:
if some_iterable:
#only if non-empty
only works when something is empty. In your case, the tuple isn't actually empty. The thing the tuple contains is empty. So you might want to do the following:
if any(map(len, my_tuple)):
#passes if any of the contained items are not empty
as len
on an empty iterable will yield 0
and thus will be converted to False
.