On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in arguably the highest-impact L.G.B.T.-rights cases ever to come before the Justices. The day before, I received what appeared to be a standard memo for members of the press who request a seat at a Supreme Court hearing: “The dress code in the press section is business attire (coat and tie required for men).” It said nothing about women’s clothing. It was almost funny. One of the three cases on the docket revolved largely around gender-specific dress codes. And I am nonbinary, which is to say that I am not a man, though I wear primarily clothes created for men or boys. Some days, most adults think I’m a man; other days, most take me for a woman. Children often ask about my sex. I spend little time thinking about the way I’m perceived, unless I’m in a public bathroom. (More on that below.) This time, though, I had to consider it: what if I didn’t wear a tie and whoever was enforcing the dress code read me as a man in violation of it? That could make it difficult for me to do my job that day. It was a measure of my privilege that I could take that risk and arrive tie-less.

The court was hearing oral arguments in three cases, from New York, Georgia, and Michigan. Two had been combined, because both involved men who had been fired from their jobs after coming out as gay. In the third case, a transgender woman, who had been living as a man, was fired after she informed her employer of her identity and declared her intention to live and work as a woman. In all three cases, the plaintiffs were arguing that what had happened to them constituted discrimination on the basis of sex, which is banned by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

We won’t know the outcomes of these cases for months, but the hearings served as more than a preview of the possible opinions; they also provided a snapshot of the current moment. Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is not illegal. Twenty-one states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam have passed legislation banning anti-L.G.B.T. discrimination, although many have carved out exemptions that severely limit the reach of the law. Marriage equality became the law of the land in 2015, but, in more than half the states in the country, you can get same-sex-married on Saturday and be fired from your job and evicted from your apartment for being gay on Monday. This is what makes these discrimination cases so important: not everyone wants to be married, but everyone has the opportunity to be subjected to discrimination—usually much more often than one has the opportunity to obtain a marriage license.

Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor, represented Gerald Lynn Bostock, who was fired from his job as a county children’s advocate in Georgia, and Donald Zarda, who was fired from his job as a skydiving instructor in New York. Bostock, who had been working with at-risk children for more than ten years, was fired after joining a gay softball league, in 2013. Zarda was fired after he told a female client that he was gay, in order to put her at ease with being tightly strapped to the instructor. Karlan argued that, if Bostock and Zarda had been women dating men, they could have kept their jobs, and therefore the firings violated the standard set by the Court for Title VII cases—they happened “because of sex,” because Bostock and Zarda were men. Karlan proposed a hypothetical: “Two employees who come in, both of whom tell you they married their partner, Bill, last weekend. When you fire the male employee who married Bill, and you give the female employee who married Bill a couple of days off so she can celebrate the joyous event, that’s discrimination because of sex.”

When Karlan’s half hour ended and it was time for her opponent, Jeffrey M. Harris, a Washington, D.C., attorney, to make his arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts made a joke. He said, “Counsel.” The hall laughed. It was funny because Supreme Court convention is to address attorneys by gendered honorifics: “Ms. Karlan,” “Mr. Harris.” Harris didn’t even seem to grasp that the Chief Justice was addressing him, and this caused a moment of quiet levity in the court. “Sorry,” Roberts said.

“Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court,” Harris said, also making a joke: he added a gendered honorific where a simple “your honor” was expected. He got a bigger laugh than Roberts.

“Touché,” Roberts said.

Harris argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was never intended to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and that all the state statutes banning such discrimination are proof of this fact—they would not be necessary if Title VII already applied. Congress has consistently declined to consider legislation that would ban such discrimination, making it clear that it is and should continue to be legal.

But, throughout the years, the Court has expanded the understanding of Title VII, especially in the 1989 case Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins. Ann Hopkins, a top Price Waterhouse accountant, was denied partnership for being too butch. She sued and won: the Court ruled that enforcing stereotypical expectations constituted discrimination “because of sex.” But Hopkins was straight. Now Harris was arguing that her case did not provide precedent for Bostock or Zarda, who were fired not for failing to conform to stereotypes but simply for possessing the distinct trait of homosexuality. Comparing the gay men to straight women to prove sex discrimination, he argued, is a false parallel; gay men should be compared to straight men, which would make it clear that they were fired on the basis of sexual orientation, not sex.

The Justices and the lawyers pursued this question of sex versus sexual orientation through a series of hypotheticals until Justice Samuel Alito posed one to Karlan, who had returned for her rebuttal. “What if the decision-maker makes a decision based on sexual orientation but does not know the biological sex of the person involved?” he asked.

Karlan couldn’t imagine this happening. “And—and how do they know the person’s sexual orientation?” she asked.

“Because somebody who interviewed the candidates tells them that.”

“And they are unable to tell anything about the person’s sex?”

“No.”

“So this is ‘Saturday Night Live’ Pat, as—as an example, right?” Karlan asked.

“Well, I’m not familiar with that,” Alito said.

Karlan explained that “you can never tell whether Pat is a man or a woman.” She thought out loud. “I mean, theoretically, that person might be out there. . . . Somebody who comes in and says, ‘I’m not going to tell you what my sex is, but, believe me, I was fired for my sexual orientation’—that person will lose.”

I became a journalist at a time when one was not supposed to cover issues that concerned one personally. The (very few) black reporters working in the mainstream media were not assigned to write about the civil-rights movement. Women were not assigned to stories on feminism. The handful of openly gay reporters were not allowed to write about gay-and-lesbian rights or the AIDS epidemic. The underlying logic of this approach was that reasonable people could disagree on issues that people with a stake in the outcome would be unable to cover in a fair and balanced manner. That this approach to journalism has been discarded in the last generation is doubtless a sign of progress, but it meant that, on Tuesday, I had the opportunity to cover the story of reasonable people disagreeing on whether my rights should be protected—and, indeed, even agreeing that they shouldn’t be.