Alert the gender police! Recruit the culture warriors. Al Capp’s Li’l Abner strip was bending gender norms more than 70 years ago. In fact, this 1953 story arc weirdly foreshadowed current skirmishes over cross-dressing, drag performance, legal gender reassignment and even “men” playing in women’s sports.

Sure, cross-dressing had been a fixture of film, stage and cartoon comedy throughout the 20^th Century. Bugs Bunny was among the great drag queens of animation. And as we saw recently in Thimble Theatre, E.C. Segar had Popeye pop in and out of dresses, even vamp some villains, across a long episode.

But when Al Capp turned Li’l Abner into “Li’l Anya” he pulled out all the stops in a gender-bending epic that ran from Feb. 23 to July 8, 1953. Just before the birth of his and Daisy Mae’s first child, Abner is desperate for work. But in order to take a job as sparring partner for Slobbovian  “gal rassler” Tara Legoff, Abner must switch teams, gender-wise. According to the usual laws of Capp’s convoluted comedy, all hell breaks loose across too many parallel storylines to recount here. Suffice to say the months-long episode ticks so many boxes of our own culture wars. In Capp’s go-to satire of Eastern Bloc culture Lower Slobbovia men are forbidden from engaging in sports with the nation’s masculinized he-women, “This protects Slobbovian boys,” quips Tara Legoff. The only recourse is to have the Slobbovian government reassign Abner’s pronouns legally.

“Li’l Anya,” Tara and her manager/father are off to New York to train, blend into its Little Slobbovia neighborhood and even go on double dates with “Pop Ivan the Sailor and Sid Seasik. The half-drag “Gorl Rasslers” are a New York sensation, hitting the cover of LIME Magazine.

This notoriety attracts the richest man in the world, General Bullmoose, who schemes to marry his weakling son to the lovely “Anya.” Woe is poor Abner…er…Anya, as the winner of a penultimate wrestling extravaganza must marry the wimpering Weakfish Bullmoose. “It’s g-gittin confoozin this bein’ a gal!!” our hero/heroine admits. “Oh – what will mah wife think when ah brings home a husband!!”

The farce comes to a climax when Tara pretzels Li’l Anya/Abner with a murderous secret Slobbovian wrestling hold just as news of a Slobbovian revolution arrives. The legal decrees of the previous regime are recalled, and Li’l Anya is re-reassigned. “Ah is a boy agin!!”

This Li’l Abner episode is a good reminder that the 21st Century culture wars didn’t invent moral panics over gender reassignment in sports. Capp is riffing off of common Cold War conspiracy theories regarding the real gender of the USSR and East Germany’s highly successful women in track and field competitions. Comments about the masculine traits of Eastern Bloc athletes was commonplace, as were rumors of hormonal treatment. In this case, at least some of these fears were not misplaced. The use of steroids and performance0-enhancing drugs was systematic in East Germany especially. To combat suspicions about the gender identity of athletes, international athletic associations introduced chromosomal testing in the mid-1960s.