‘Jeopardy!’ Contestant Amy Schneider Becomes First Out Trans Person To Qualify For Tournament Of Champions

Engineering manager Amy Schneider has made Jeopardy! history after a streak that has only gotten hotter since last week.

Schneider has amassed a 13-game win streak and $536,400 in prize money winnings, cementing multiple placings in the Jeopardy Hall of Fame alongside Jeopardy! legends like James Holzhauer, Brad Rutter, and current host Ken Jennings. Schneider is 7th in the Most Consecutive Games Won category, 4th in Highest Winnings and 8th in the All-Time Winnings category which includes tournament prize-pools.

While she’s not the very first openly transgender contestant to play or win Jeopardy!, Schneider’s appearance has been particularly impactful since it has come during a very hard year for the often-overlooked transgender community.

The Jeopardy! website posted a glowing streaker update on Schneider. They noted that the majority of her victories have been “runaway games,” or when the highest-earning player has more than double the score of the next-highest earner going into Final Jeopardy.

After winning her 10th game, Schneider spoke about her journey on the show with Jimmy McGuire for a Winner’s Circle interview. Schneider quipped: “I’m not going to pretend I didn’t think I could do good, but this has just been so much better than I thought I would do,” when asked what her streak meant to her. She displays quiet confidence but admitted to feeling very stressed on one of her non-runaway games “so I want to keep doing runaways, I think.”

Schneider claimed that Jeopardy! “was always in my sweet spot of things I wanted to do,” because she grew up watching it with her parents, and her mother was a college professor.  She even opened up about growing up with “a distorted idea of what it meant to be trans,” and realizing she was trans herself after meeting Natasha Muse in the San Francisco comedy scene.

Schneider even had some fighting words for Jeopardy! Champion Holzhauer, listing him as the Champion she’d most like to beat because “he seems very confident.”

The 2022 Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions cast and premiere dates have not been announced yet. You can watch the continuing 38th Season of Jeopardy! now on NBC, with Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik slated to alternate hosting duties until the end of 2021.