There was never much reason to hope that the Supreme Court, which heard two cases on Tuesday asking whether transgender women have a right to play women’s high school or college sports, was going to side with those athletes. The Court has a 6-3 Republican majority. And, even if it didn’t, existing law isn’t particularly favorable to trans women seeking to play on a sex-segregated sports team.

Nothing said during Tuesday’s arguments in Little v. Hecox or West Virginia v. B.P.J. suggested that the athletes at the heart of these two cases are likely to prevail (although the Court may dismiss Hecox, because the plaintiff in that case is a college senior who does not intend to play sports for the rest of her time as a student, potentially making her case moot). Few of the justices appeared interested in the trans plaintiffs’ strongest legal arguments, and a surprising amount of the justices’ questions focused on a genuinely novel and difficult issue that most of the justices appeared likely to resolve against trans athletes.

The high-water mark for trans rights in the Supreme Court was Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which held that a federal law banning employment discrimination “on the basis of sex” protects trans workers from discrimination.

Bostock assumed that laws barring “sex” discrimination bar only discrimination based on “biological distinctions between male and female” (that is, they forbid discrimination based on sex assigned at birth). But, that’s enough to protect trans workers. If a cisgender male worker may wear clothing associated with men, use a male name, and otherwise present as a man, then an “employee who was identified as female at birth” must also be allowed to do so.

The Bostock framework, however,........

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