After 40 consecutive Jeopardy! victories, Oakland-based engineer Amy Schneider’s time on the show ended last week, concluding what had been one of the most captivating game show runs in recent memory — and saddening the legions of LGBTQ+ fans who looked to Schneider as a trans quiz show hero.
She lost to Rhone Talsma, a gay librarian from Illinois whose neon glasses seem destined to become a meme, and for whom she clearly had no hard feelings.
“We chat on Instagram,” Schneider told them. shortly after her last episode aired. “We chatted some last night. We have, off and on, and we’ll probably get together next time I’m in Chicago.”
Objectively speaking, Schneider’s run is impressive, making her the show’s longest-lasting woman contestant and putting her second overall behind Ken Jennings’ 74-game streak. But her $1,382,000 winnings fell considerably below the $2,464,216 that James Holzhauer amassed in 2019 over only 32 games. (Jennings netted just north of $2.5 million in all.)
That’s because Holzhauer is a professional gambler and World Series of Poker player, and approached the game by purposefully trying to maximize his Daily Double wagers. Schneider, meanwhile, wasn’t out to upend convention. She advanced across the board simply by playing each category sequentially, amassing her streak solely on the basis of her vast erudition and her skill with the buzzer. Unlike game theorist and prolific Twitter user Arthur Chu, who won 11 games in 2014 with a controversially aggressive style, Schneider didn’t zigzag around, and her methodology may be as conservative as her personal style, framed by pearls given to her by her girlfriend, Genevieve.
Did she think she grew a little bolder every time she flew back to L.A. to tape another run of episodes? “Yeah, I think maybe slightly on Daily Double wagers,” she says.
“I have a bit more sympathy” for overcautious wagerers, she continues. “It’s so hard to pull the trigger on that. I was trying to push myself to maximize my chances in that way, but other than that I wouldn’t say a lot changed. As I’ve been watching my performance on TV and reading the Reddits and seeing other people’s discussion about it, I would change a few things. But nothing major — you’re just in this bubble.”
Schneider and I have a lot in common. We’re both trans, in our early 40s, live in the Bay Area, and went to Catholic high schools that were run by a very small religious order known as the Marianists. We were also both Jeopardy! contestants, although that is where the resemblance ends. I took third place on a show that aired on April 4, 2003, which remains the most colossally disappointing day of my entire existence on this planet.
And indeed, you are in a bubble while playing Jeopardy! The pace is blistering and I barely remember being there. (Whenever I watch the show now, I squeal with encouragement at the TV every time somebody risks everything, whether they get it right or not.) I did utter the phrase “I’d like to make it a true Daily Double,” which is to say I bet everything I had at the time, but the correct response was Norway and I guessed Sweden. Flubbing a question about Scandinavia stung because I consider geography to be my top subject, the first pie piece I always acquire in a game of Trivial Pursuit. No spoiler here, but on Schneider’s final Final Jeopardy, she, too, tripped up on a geography clue.
“I definitely think of geography as a strong point, which made it hard to lose on,” she says, barely 12 hours after America collectively processed her defeat the night before.
History is another of her strengths. With their connotation of highfalutin learning, the works of Shakespeare have routinely popped up on Jeopardy!, and Schneider had an advantage there because she’s performed in so many of his plays. Music is a comparative weakness, she says, along with more lowbrow pop culture categories, like “celebrity relationships and divorces and things.” What about sports trivia, which seems equal in mass and volume to all other trivia subjects combined, and which may not necessarily be a strong suit for your typical LGBTQ+ smartypants?
“Sports was one that I generally felt confident in,” she says. “Not because I’m particularly good at sports trivia, but I am by the standards of people who appear on Jeopardy!”
Schneider participates in a delightfully arcane, invitation-only online trivia game known as LearnedLeague. (I only heard about it from a college friend last spring, after The New Yorker profiled it, and it’s more addictive than Wordle.) She plays at the top tier, known as “Rundle A,” which happens to be where I took dead last at the hands of the smartest trivia nerds in the English-speaking world last season. It barely existed when I went on Jeopardy!, for which I mostly prepared by having drunk friends hit me with random Trivial Pursuit cards.
“Trivia Pursuit is not great trivia,” Schneider says. “I’m not a fan of it. It’s too weirdly specific, and it doesn’t have a rhyme or reason to it. I think I did have some friends — especially as it got close to the first taping date — quiz me on stuff. But I just used old Jeopardy! clues.”
Now that it’s all over, she’s guaranteed to play in the Tournament of Champions, and strongly suspects that the producers might find other ways to invite her back on. In either case, Schneider is the most exciting phenomenon of the show’s post-Trebek era, and although she was initially disappointed that COVID restrictions delayed her scheduled appearance until after the veteran host’s November 2020 death, she and interim host Ken Jennings clearly got along.
Schneider takes to Twitter to discuss most games with fans, and a pinned tweet casually dismisses her trolls, in the style of brushing your shoulder while rolling your eyes. Beyond transphobes, she became aware of other types of haters by interacting with fans and scrolling through Reddit. Some conspiracy theorists insisted she was being fed answers, owing to her occasional mispronunciations (something familiar to many people who get most of their knowledge from reading).
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve said ‘diplodocus’ out loud,” she said, deliberately rendering it as dip-loh-DOH-cuss. “And then Ken said ‘dip-LOD-oh-cuss’ out loud. The idea that I’ve been getting questions in advance, if you’ve ever seen the production — you know how ridiculous it is. They have outside lawyers monitoring things. Since the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s, anyone who thinks the show is rigged just doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”
Any online harassment was more than offset when Molly Shannon congratulated her via Instagram direct message, or a Twitter exchange with Harvey Fierstein, and there’s a disarming, not-bad-for-a-girl-from-Ohio vibe to Schneider as she relates these anecdotes. She grew up Catholic, with strict, Jeopardy!-watching parents who instilled a love of learning in their children. (Her father even tried out for the show.)
Post-Jeopardy!, the theater-loving Schneider hopes to turn to voice acting, which would be a significant advance for trans representation in media. But it’s a win for a contestant whose voice had been a major locus of her gender dysphoria.
“I can go more feminine with my voice if I really try to, and that was my original plan, but it felt fake and inauthentic somehow,” she says. “It also was like, ‘l don’t need this extra thing to think about’ — and as a result, that helped me push through a lot of the dysphoria. Hearing myself on national TV day after day, I had to get used to it.”
Historically, Jeopardy! winners have skewed decidedly male. Schneider has always framed her success in terms of its benefit to any young trans girls watching — and not just trans girls, but “nerdy trans girls.” A deep connection between trans-ness and nerdiness exists, Schneider believes, and it’s not just the number of trans women in tech.
“Being trans, one of the things that led me to [transition] was curiosity about girls and women and how they see things, and to try to put myself in their minds and heads,” she says. “Doing that, and pushing all your interests outwards, applies well to fandoms or whatever else.”
In other words, a trivia nerd’s restless need to learn about the world can also help you find your footing as a trans person. “Can you go back on Jeopardy! if you change your name?” is a question I’ve gotten numerous times from friends while discussing my own gender odyssey. The answer is nope, you have your chance and then you’re essentially banned for life. I was never going to be Amy Schneider, though. What's heartrending is that she's opened the doors for someone else to get their chance someday, too.
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for them.'s weekly newsletter here.