"Jeopardy! fans are like trans people: There’s not actually that many of us, but everybody knows a few."

If you are the kind of person who cares deeply about Jeopardy!, you probably realized Amy Schneider was going to have a long run on the show after just a few games. She debuted on the show on November 17, then quickly set out dominating her opponents. To date, she has won with less than $30,000 just one time, and even then, she pulled in $14,800. (Atypically, she missed her Final Jeopardy answer in that low-scoring episode. It remains her only Final Jeopardy mistake across her first 13 episodes.)

Schneider's rise through the ranks of all-time Jeopardy! champs has been meteoric. As of the Friday, December 3, 2021, episode (the last to air before I published this newsletter), she is fourth on the all-time regular season earnings list with $536,400 in total. She now sits out two weeks, as the show hosts a tournament for professors, but she will return on Monday, December 20.

Schneider's success is also notable, at least in my eyes, because she is by far the most successful trans person in Jeopardy! history. Kate Freeman became the first openly trans player to win a game of Jeopardy! in late 2020, but Schneider's run is heartening, as it comes at a time when trans rights are continually under assault in the US. Yet her run has been greeted with excitement for her achievements by the older Jeopardy! fanbase. Schneider is practicing a kind of quiet activism, not really broadcasting her trans identity but underlining it all the same by wearing a trans pin (an idea she borrowed from Freeman).

I have been vastly enjoying Schneider's run, both because she's an incredibly skilled Jeopardy! player and trivia master and because, well, I always enjoy seeing other trans people succeed. So I thought it would be fun to talk to Schneider about how she got into trivia, Ken Jennings's hosting abilities, and finding ways to show America that trans people can just be incredibly normal game show champions.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

If you live in America, Jeopardy! is just like oxygen, and you’ve always known about it. But how did you get into trivia more generally?

Everybody’s aware of Jeopardy! But I’ve been following it my whole life. My parents watched it, and I grew up watching it. I’ve always been a big fan. But how many people actually are big fans, and how many people just sort of vaguely know it exists? Jeopardy! fans are like trans people: There’s not actually that many of us, but everybody knows a few.

As far as trivia, part of it is just the luck of genetics. That’s how my brain works. Things stick in it. I definitely think a lot of it goes to my mother. She was a college professor and a math teacher. She was definitely about what you’d call the life of the mind and intellectual achievement and stimulation as its own reward.

She was Catholic, and growing up in the ‘50s in a conservative, WASPy suburb, there was still a decent amount of anti-Catholic prejudice that her family dealt with. It was always about, “We need to show these people that we’re not idol-worshipping heathens.. We know about Shakespeare and all these other things and can talk about them intelligently.” It got passed down to me.

I’ve said this on the show, but in eighth grade, I was voted most likely to be on Jeopardy! And my dad got to the last stage of auditions. So to an extent, I’ve always wanted to. I started trying more seriously probably 15 years ago.

The way it’s been set up until recently is you could take the test once a year. When you do that, no matter how well you do, there’s just a random chance that they will look at you. They can’t even look at everybody that does well on the test. I got to the final stage of auditions a couple of times, but it was late summer 2020 that I got the call that they wanted to have me on.

I was scheduled to tape my episodes at the end of September 2020. I was excited, because I knew there was only a limited amount of time that Alex [Trebek] would be with us. And I thought I’d made it. I was down in LA, ready to tape the next day, and they called and said there was an issue with Covid and negotiations with the unions over how to handle Covid, so they had to cancel taping. After that, I was rescheduled, and then Alex passed away and I was canceled again.

Eventually, for me and a handful of other people that had been rescheduled more than one, they wrote to say, “We’re not going to schedule you again until we’re confident that things are stable and we won’t have to cancel on you again.” So then it was a year of waiting. And I wondered if all the people I told I was going to be on Jeopardy! thought I was lying. And then finally in September [2021], they called and said they were ready to go.

So you had a solid year to prepare, which is not the way it usually is. How did you use that time?

The main thing was just going through all the games that they’ve ever had, which I could do thanks to J-Archive.com. It’s an incredible resource, and it has every clue ever. The other thing I did was thanks to a tip I picked up from the book Prisoner of Trebekistan: For subjects you don’t know well, the For Dummies books, like Opera for Dummies or Classical Music for Dummies, will give you a good survey of all the stuff that’s likely to be asked on Jeopardy! Because they’re not going to go too deep into it.

Beyond that, there’s only so much you can do. You have to be learning stuff and remembering stuff in your daily life. In the week or two leading up to being on the show, I was, like, “I should be cramming!” But I couldn’t have really done it. It’s not going to come down to something I learned in the last week, almost certainly. So I decided I know what I know. And let’s see how it goes.

When you were just a casual Jeopardy! viewer, what were the categories where you always got everything right? Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve always done well at the TV categories.

Geography is always something that I’ve been into. They had the National Geography Bee when I was in grade school. I won it three times at my school, and I did pretty well in state one year. The prize I got for one of them was an atlas, and I would get it down and page through it and look at it. It really interested me. How do all the countries fit together? That sort of thing.

The other subject is history. I got more into it in adulthood. I read a lot more nonfiction than fiction these days, which didn’t used to be the case. There’s something about history and how, again, it’s sort of a puzzle of how things fit together. How do all of these things relate to each other? You can’t put any dividing lines in history, however much you try. I’ll see a review in the New York Times that says something like, “This is a great new history of the Crimean War,” then think, “Oh, the Crimean War. I never really figured out what the deal is with that.” So I’ll buy that book and read it.

I’m building this stereotype of trans women — obviously a great thing to do — that we’re all really into geography. I’ve known so many trans women who spent their childhoods staring at maps and memorizing maps, myself included. I think it stems from this vague idea that somewhere, there’s something better.

I remember I would pick a city at random in the index [of the atlas] and flip to it and look at it. I would make up stories about living there and tell them to my brother about who lives there and what they do. And then they go down the river to this other city. That sort of thing.

What are the categories you historically haven’t been as great at?

Definitely popular music. Unless we’re talking about alternative rock from roughly 1993 to 2001, I never really listened to it that much. It’s such a broad category, so you can’t just study the highlights the way you can with something like opera.

You mentioned that you could have been part of Alex’s last few weeks as host. That would have been really special, but it’s starting to feel like Ken Jennings is the heir apparent, and you’ve been part of his sustained run as host. How has he been as host? And how is he to interact with when he’s not on camera?

He’s great. I wasn’t necessarily expecting that. He was waiting in the wings, and I didn’t really like that, because he was very good at playing Jeopardy! But hosting is a very different skillset. So I was pleasantly surprised that he really seems great at it. He’s very relaxed and comfortable. He sets the contestants at ease. He’s really sharp with his banter. Some of it is pre-written, but he might be responding to an incorrect answer that you couldn’t predict, and he’s still really sharp with it.

He’s also good with the anecdotes. A friend described that as “the boring part where they tell stories.” So selling a bunch of trivia nerds telling what are not always the most interesting anecdotes is a hard part of the job, and he does well with that.

It was clear that he’d been working really hard at doing the job, training and that sort of thing. So I have nothing but good things to say about him, and I was a little surprised by that.

He’s just a dork, and that suits the show well. At the end of every one of your episodes, he’s, like, “Well, you’re here on the all-time leader chart!” I assume somebody comes up and tells him that, but I want to know if he just knows it off the top of his head.

He has a decent idea for sure. He kind of knows where people topped out, and I’m pretty sure he’s definitely keeping an eye out, wondering who’s going to be the one to finally match his streak. He loves the show, and he knows its history very well.

So let’s talk about identity stuff and transition and auditioning. I’m so often labeled, like, “the trans critic.” Obviously, every article written about you, including this one, is going to mention your transition, and that’s fine. And I have this terrible feeling in my brain that in some ways, my career has been improved by me coming out as trans. I get invited to make a lot more appearances on podcasts and radio shows especially. But I’m not sure that that’s because I’m trans as much as it is that I’m a much more engaging person to talk to and listen to now.

I auditioned for Jeopardy! Back in the 2000s, when I was a deeply closeted egg. I got to the final round, and they saw me, and I was this weird, shambling half-human. I was very monotone and not interesting. I bet I would do better if I auditioned now. Does that idea resonate with you at all?

Literally last night, I was having a conversation about this with a friend and my girlfriend. And what I’ve felt is that I do think I benefited in the sense that Jeopardy! has to fight to not have their contestants be a constant string of same-looking white guys. I don’t like saying that, because I worry it will give people an excuse to say, like, “These people aren’t really earning their way on!” But there are way more people qualified to be on Jeopardy! than they can ever put on the show. So when they’re picking among many high-quality candidates, they want more diverse contestants, because they don’t want to put on a boring show.

But what you said is also right. Something I realized recently is that I’m a much more open person. I show so much more of my personality on my face and in how I act. Maybe I would have been as good at trivia back before I transitioned. But I certainly wouldn’t have been as engaging on TV. That probably did come across and play a factor in my audition.

You mentioned how Jeopardy! could have a bunch of interchangeable white guys, and the show has more candidates than it will ever know what to do with. So obviously there are a lot of women who are great at trivia and plenty of women who’ve done well on Jeopardy! In fact, Julia Collins’s winning streak of 20 games is still ahead of you on the leader charts as the woman who’s won the most games in a row.

But trivia is also so gendered in our society. The environment of, say, bar trivia can be so full of shiity, toxic men, and I don’t really want to go to that environment because I think people will either be shitty to me there or treat me as an object of fascination. Did you have to navigate that shift in expectations as the world started to perceive you as who you are, as opposed to who they thought you were?

The first taping day, before I’d done anything and even on the second one, I got a sense that people saw me as less threatening of a competitor than they would have normally. And there were times I could feel myself doing it as I looked at the other contestants! So that’s been a factor [in my run].

I mean, I’m here in the Bay Area bubble, and I just don’t go to male dominated spaces, because I’ve never liked to do that. I’ve noticed that shift in expectations more in my professional life in the tech industry. There’s a lot of trans women in the tech industry, so it’s not like I’m unique, but it definitely changes how people perceive me in terms of my ability to write code and that sort of thing.

I mentioned before being perceived as “the trans critic.” I have deeply ambivalent feelings about that, because I hate being boiled down to my identity. But I also realize that people can see me and interact with me on social media. They can see I’m just a normal human. I feel like you’ve been using this platform as a similar way of saying, “I’m trans. It’s incidental to who I am and my trivia skills, but it’s also important that you know that.” How did you think about that sort of quiet activism as you were preparing?

Kate Freeman [the first openly trans woman to win a game of Jeopardy!] had worn a trans pin when she was on. And I thought a lot about if that was something I wanted to do. All those sorts of questions.

But the thing that I needed to see before I could realize my identity was normal trans people who were just normal people and not some exoticized thing. And if that was the case for them, then maybe that was who I was after all. It’s a funny thing. My identity is something that is both so incredibly important and something I don’t really think about that much. So I was definitely thinking about how to balance those two things.

One thing I will say is that the people at Jeopardy! were fantastic in so many different ways. They did not refer to my transness at any point until I brought it up. They would have been completely fine if I hadn’t brought it up first. They would have left it completely unspoken, and I appreciated that.

It’s also such a fraught time for trans rights. This is a tiny way you can be, like, “Listen, the assault on trans rights is an assault on me, beloved Jeopardy! champion.”

Exactly. I do at times feel a certain amount of guilt about having a pretty easy life and living in Oakland where it’s just never really a thing. My rights are not directly under attack here, at this time in history, as opposed to even 10 years ago. A part of me feels like I’m benefiting from the work that others have done, so it’s nice to feel like I’m able to benefit others.

Talk back to me: Would you like to see more Q&As in Episodes? Let me know!

What I've been up to: Have you seen the Netflix animated series City of Ghosts? It's tremendously cute and a whole lot of fun. It's got a bunch of ghosts that are just puffy lil clouds. Who can't enjoy that?? I wrote about it for Vox.

Set in Los Angeles, City of Ghosts follows the four-member “ghost club,” a group of kids who take on ghostly mysteries around the city. Their adventures are presented as a faux-reality show, with ghost club leader Zelda (the smallest, gravest child of them all) roping her older brother into filming their exploits. (In a very fun touch, we sometimes hear said brother but don’t see him.) Talking head interviews and establishing shots of locations are accompanied by titles written in marker on cardboard, which tiny hands hold up in front of the camera. The kids conduct surprisingly professional interviews. It’s all very handmade and cute.

What you missed if you're not a subscriber to Episodes: We had another week off, due to some editorial scheduling errors on my part. But if you're a subscriber, did you check out Priyanka Aidasani's great piece on The Girl Who Leapt Through Time from right after Thanksgiving?

Life is found in those smaller moments. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time refuses to lose perspective about how important those tiny moments can be. This is not a story about Makoto changing the world. This is a story about how the unusual circumstances Makoto finds herself in draw from within her something she already possesses: the courage to face the challenges of adolescence on her journey to become the person she is meant to be. And that courage is as much about responsibly using her powers as it is about being vulnerable and having uncomfortable conversations about her feelings.

Read me: The great author Sarah Gailey has a wonderful piece on writing about trauma that I think should be essential reading for anyone trying to grapple with this moment in how we tell stories.

Similarly, the notion of acceptance does not apply to trauma work. Trauma occurs when something happens that is intolerable to the person experiencing it. This experience may not be universally intolerable, but that doesn’t matter; trauma is personal, not universal. An attempt to reframe the intolerable as tolerable fundamentally misunderstands and disrespects the nature of trauma. One can choose to accept one’s own history and reality, but that is entirely different from arguing that the events or circumstances of one’s trauma are or ever were acceptable.
Rather than healing or acceptance, the work of living alongside trauma and constructing trauma-informed narratives demands careful, thoughtful integration. Characters who endure traumatic events must be allowed to inhabit a world in which trauma is possible, has occurred, and continues to impact their lives. Readers who endure traumatic events deserve to read stories that acknowledge this reality.

Watch me: I spent a lot of this new video on the blandness of so much LGBTQ representation doing that thing where I snap my fingers in approval. There's some light comedic transphobia at the start but to prove a point. Check it out!

And another thing... The only sport I pay real attention to anymore is Major League Soccer, for reasons I can't even begin to explain to you, and anyway, I'm so sorry that Real Salt Lake's chaotic destruction run in this year's playoffs was halted in the semifinals. Alack and alas. (I do love that the two teams in the finals are both four seeds. I love the soccer.)

Opening credits sequence of the week: One of the TV shows I've always been curious about but have never actually watched is the one-season wonder My World and Welcome to It, which won the Emmy for comedy series in 1970. Based on the writing of James Thurber, its writing staff included a bunch of TV comedy heavyweights, and it's yet another sitcom that just slightly predates Mary Tyler Moore and All in the Family and seems to be predicting their rise.

A thing I had to look up: I spent a lot of time combing Jeopardy! stats in the process of writing this article. Fortunately, the internet is full of Jeopardy! super fans, which is news that will surprise many of you, I'm sure.

This week's reading music: "Singing in the Land," Elizabeth Mitchell, Natalie Merchant, Happy Traum, and John Sebastian

Episodes is published three times per week. Mondays feature my thoughts on assorted topics. Wednesdays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. Fridays are TV recaps written by myself. The Wednesday and Friday editions are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.