12/30/21

Amy Schneider wins $706,000 Becoming all time Female Jeopardy! Winner

Amy Schneider / People Magazine

Transgender woman Amy Schneider made history on the popular daytime game show “Jeopardy!” that aired on Wednesday, winning for the 21st time and breaking the record for most wins by a woman.

In Tuesday's episode, Today reports she tied the 2014 record set by Julia Collins.

Dawn Ennis interviews Amy Schneider for the Daily Beast and asks her about being a trans person in such a high profile situation.

“I really want to praise everybody on Jeopardy!” Schneider said. “Until I brought it up, they never mentioned or referred to me being trans. And had I not brought it up, it was clear that they wouldn’t. And it would never have been commented on if I didn’t want it to be. I really appreciated that about them. I never had one even mildly uncomfortable moment around that with anyone on the Jeopardy! staff, and that was really, really great.”

So why out herself at all?

“One of the motivations was, I don’t want people wondering, and I don’t want people getting weird about it,” explained Schneider. “I also didn’t want to give the impression that it was a secret, and that it was something I wanted to conceal or that I was ashamed of, in any way, or anything like that. So, I didn’t want to be, you know, ‘the trans person,’ but I also didn’t want pretend like that wasn’t true or it didn’t matter.”

The former title holder Larissa Kelly congradulated Amy on her win, "Well, it was fun to hold a Jeopardy record for a few years...but it's been even more fun to watch @Jeopardamy set new standards for excellence, on the show and off. Congratulations to Amy on becoming the woman with the highest overall earnings in the show's history!"

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