Here’s the clue: To the chagrin of every living transphobe, she is the most successful woman in Jeopardy! history, a cultural icon who won $1.3 million over the course of 40 consecutive games, reigniting a passion for trivia among countless LGBTQ+ fans in the process.
Answer: Who is Amy Schneider?
That question is, sort of, what Schneider herself investigates in her debut memoir In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life, out October 2 from Avid Reader Press. In the book, Schneider defies any expectation readers might have had based on her squeaky-clean Jeopardy! presence: she recounts stories about doing key bumps of cocaine in noisy club bathrooms, the ins and outs of her polyamorous sex life (pun very much intended), and even how fetish communities affected her path to coming out as trans.
While there are some topics that remain personal, Schneider invites readers into some of the most intimate areas of her life as she pokes around them herself, unpacking her religious trauma, her feelings about certain slurs, and the media that helped her find herself, such as the cult-favorite cartoon Daria. Schneider also writes extensively about the various moments that inspired her to transition, like a fateful production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that led her to wonder what it would be like to be feminine all the time. (“Fireworks. Explosions. Dogs and cats living together.”)
Each chapter title is phrased as a question, cheekily playing off the Jeopardy! format while also evoking the relentless interrogation trans people often face from their cisgender peers. It’s candid and vulnerable, but the answers always unfold on Schneider’s own terms — and they are frequently laugh-out-loud funny, especially when you take time to read her extensive, tangent-filled footnotes. (“There’s a reason there’s less camaraderie in men’s rooms,” she posits in one chapter. “It’s because we all have to get our dicks out in front of each other. Whose idea was this?”)
Ahead of the book’s release, Schneider spoke with Them over the phone about radical honesty, her thoughts on identity and tarot, and when we can expect quiz shows to finally start asking about feminization porn.
I just got medicated for my own probably-ADHD situation, so I felt very seen in particular by your chapter on ADD. What was it like working around and with your brain to actually bring all this together into a finished book?
When I was pitching it to publishers, I was saying, “It’s going to be more of an essay collection than a book,” just because I knew that the only way I had a chance [of finishing] was to break it down into manageable pieces and not get overwhelmed. And I certainly am glad I did that. It was still quite the challenge, in particular because the time when I was writing this book also happened to be about the busiest I have ever been, with all kinds of other things going on.
When writing was hard, as it so often is, there were always a bunch of legitimately good reasons to put it off, and that was definitely challenging to work with. If I didn’t just have to get it done, I don’t know that I ever would have.
If I didn’t have editors, I would get half the things done that I do.
I remember reading a Douglas Adams quote: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” Came to identify with that, for sure.
I loved how prolific the footnotes are in this book. Was that part of your overall neurospicy strategy to keep things flowing? And also, are you a Terry Pratchett reader?
I am a Pratchett reader, for sure. Although I came to Discworld late in life, so David Foster Wallace was the first person I saw use footnotes that extensively in his essay writing. I hadn’t thought about it, but when you say that, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I can see the Pratchett in there, too.”
For whatever reason, I guess I just didn’t have sufficient trust in my editor at the beginning or something, and I thought that he would be against footnotes. So I was kind of shying away from it for a while, but then, when I was writing the ADD chapter, I was like, “Well, it fits so perfectly here that it can’t be denied.” Once I’d done that, I had the green light to go back through everything else and put them in there because otherwise, it was just going to be a bunch of parenthetical asides that broke up the flow and weren’t really working. Or I would just have to leave stuff out that I wanted to say, and I didn’t like that option either.
You reveal a bunch of things about your life in this book that will probably surprise some people: you go in depth on your experiences with drugs, especially cocaine, and you also name-drop “sissy hypno” porn at one point. I’ve written about that last topic a little bit myself, and it’ll get you some letters. You could have very much kept to the safe assumptions that people had about you from seeing you on Jeopardy! and hidden the totality of you as a person. What made you decide to be totally candid about some of this stuff?
There were a few things. One is that that’s just kind of how I am. I don’t want there to be things that are secret about me, because then I have to worry about them coming out. I want to own everything about me. Maybe it’s something that I regret and have changed my mind over, but so it goes, that’s life.
The main thing about it was I heard from so many people — unsurprisingly, given the Jeopardy! demographic — that I was the first trans person that they or their older relative had seen or accepted, which was wonderful and super gratifying and everything. But I became very conscious of the fact that these people had seen me on Jeopardy! as the most normal, inoffensive thing in America, and showing my most normal, inoffensive self, as I should have been. That’s not the place to be talking about sissy hypno porn.
Although the day that Jeopardy! does make a sissy hypno question-
That’s a great point. Do I dare to dream? [laughs] But for these older people who accept me no problem because they saw me in this “safe” way, are they then going to be around other trans people who have had some of these same non-family-friendly experiences that I’ve had? And are they going to be like, “Oh, I’m not transphobic. I like that nice lady on TV. Why can’t they be like that nice lady on TV?” I wanted to show that the “nice lady on TV” has also had all these different parts of my life, and that they’re not incompatible with being on Jeopardy! and being successful and fitting into society as needed.
The other thing was, I would like to be a writer as a career. It’s something I never really allowed myself to consider until this opportunity came along, but it sounds wonderful. At the end of the day, writing about trivia and that sort of thing is not what I’m interested in, and I don’t feel like I can sustain that as a career. I had to try to reach people who aren’t just Jeopardy! people, and this felt like the right way to do it.
In one of your journal excerpts that you revisited, you wrote to yourself, “Maybe I’ll try being a pirate for a while, or a writer or a woman.” I thought, that is the self-denial phase in a nutshell, that all of these things are framed as being equally absurd and unattainable. Are you feeling a congruent sort of way about finding your way to writing and transition?
I am, and I don’t know how much I had thought that through consciously. Being famous was not something I was expecting. Unsurprisingly, there was a fair amount of impostor syndrome-type emotions that came up when everybody was telling me how great I was all of a sudden.
But as I got accustomed to it, I sort of realized, it’s a thing that happens to people. I’m not especially undeserving of it. This is what’s happened to me, and I have every right to take the opportunities that have been given to me. But I think that is a good analogy of things that I had been telling myself were impossible, and then realizing that was the story I was telling myself, and there was no particular reason to believe it was true.
The corollary to this is what you decided to leave back and keep to yourself. There are some stories that you tell from your relationship, but the bulk of it is personal and not up for public consumption. What was the process for you in deciding “this is a secret I don’t want to keep,” versus “this is something personal that just exists for me”?
It really wasn’t so much about things that I wanted to keep secret for myself. I had this exhibitionist feeling of wanting to get everything out there. The main thing was being conscious of the fact that not everybody in my life feels the same way, and I don’t have the right to violate their privacy. When it came to deciding what to leave in and what to keep out, I would say that 90% of the decisions about keeping something out were because I felt like it might be hurtful to somebody else.
I also wanted to ask you about tarot.
I hear you’re trans, so that’s not surprising.
Yeah, tarot is very trans! I think we’re seeing a more visible queer, transness applied to tarot practice. Is that your sense as well?
Yeah, it’s definitely one of the stereotypes — not necessarily pejoratively, but it just does seem to be a common thread. I’m not 100% certain that I understand why, but if I had to venture my theory, it would be that trans people are very interested in self-knowledge, and that’s what tarot is good at: helping you toward self-knowledge.
To me, it seems like the two big ones are tarot and obviously astrology, in the broader queer umbrella. And astrology always seems more prescriptive to me, but tarot is inviting you to do some introspection — to think about why things are the way they are and what you want.
I think that that’s true. I’ve dabbled in and gotten some value out of light astrology, if you will, but I agree that it doesn’t appeal to me in the same way as tarot, and I think what you’re saying makes sense. I think that astrology, by its nature, is sort of saying that there are immutable characteristics of you. To an extent, it feels sort of limiting to me in that way. How can everything be fixed by the stars at my birth when I’m so different now than I was five years ago? And that was so different than I was 10 years ago, and on and on.
You don’t really spend too much time on specific political issues in your book, but you do dedicate a short chapter to trans bathroom access. Why did that in particular feel important for you to highlight?
That’s actually a good question, now that you mention that. Why did it? I came out in California in a liberal environment, and I’ve had a relatively easy path. The bathroom is the thing that I was the most afraid of, because it was the thing that I heard the most hysteria about, that this is something that’s threatening to women. That’s something I talk about: to be told that what I’m doing is hurtful to women, which is very much the last thing that I want.
I also think that bathroom hysteria is one of the things that I find most difficult to actually understand, because again, you don’t see anybody’s genitals in the bathroom. It’s still private. What is the mechanism by which letting trans women into a woman’s bathroom causes problems? Because: A) we’re all in stalls, and B) a man can just dress up like a woman anyway if they want to. So I just don’t get what harm that is supposed to be preventing.
So much of what I feel about anti-trans [sentiment] is that so much of it just goes away when everybody actually gets to know any trans people. Until you have, I can sort of see why you feel that way, with the stereotypes we’re all raised with. But the bathroom one, it just doesn’t do it. How can you feel that way?
The way you chose to structure this memoir applies very well to the whole concept of the trans memoir, because the genre is dogged by cisgender curiosity, framed by all the questions they have of the trans people in their lives and in the public eye. One of the biggest questions that always comes up is “when did you know?” And your chapter bearing that title ends with you saying, “I don’t much care when I knew I was trans, or even if I know it now,” which I think is a valuable perspective for this kind of book. Can you talk a little bit more about that feeling, and growing beyond the cis-interrogative memoir format?
The idea that when I report on my own inner state of mind and my own brain, the burden of proof is on me to prove that I really believe what I claim to believe is kind of insulting. It’s like, “Oh, you say this, but how am I supposed to know that you’re really trans?” And I’m like, “Well, I am the greatest authority in the world on what’s going on inside my own brain.” That’s all there is to it.
Because that’s not how society is, and because we are all taught that we do have to prove it and justify it, I went through a long period of not believing myself and convincing myself that I was delusional. In retrospect, I’m very upset that I had to do that. The real instant that I knew it, seems to me, is that moment [I write about] after Shakespeare rehearsal where I was like, “Oh, shit. This feels really good.” That could have been it, and should have been it, and it’s a shame that it wasn’t it for me.
It goes back to my journey out of the religious faith I was raised in, because then I was like, “OK, what can I believe in?” That’s a complicated and difficult question. What can I trust? What can I really know? When I say that, I think actually what it’s really about is feeling awkward and out of place my whole life, trying to figure out what people really believed, what the unwritten expectations were. What are people really saying? What do they really want? Because I didn’t trust that they were being honest.
Is there anything that didn't come up while we were talking, that I didn't ask about, that you were hoping to talk about in this interview?
I love it when I get interviewed by a trans person.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life is available October 3 from Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
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