‘Jeopardy!’ champion Amy Schneider interview on her new memoir

Jeopardy! followers know Amy Schneider as a fierce competitor and a fount of data about most every part, however she needs folks to know that she loses her telephone in her condominium similar to the remainder of us.

Schneider, who notched 40 consecutive wins on the present in her 2021/2022 run — solely host Ken Jennings had an extended streak — writes candidly about her time on TV, in addition to her expertise with fame, her wrestle along with her physique, how she knew she’s trans and extra in her candid new memoir, Within the Type of a Query: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life.

“As I used to be writing it, I used to be additionally adjusting to being a public determine and particularly a type of consultant to lots of people of the trans group within the sense of being the primary trans person who many Jeopardy! viewers had gotten to know,” Schneider tells Yahoo Leisure. “I turned very aware of the truth that, whereas I definitely was attempting to be as a lot my genuine self, it was a really restricted self.”

Schneider was truly the primary trans contestant to qualify for the Match of Champions within the present’s historical past. However she felt like her appearances have been setting an inconceivable normal for trans folks that even she could not dwell as much as, so she determined to put all of it on the market.

Wanting to point out ‘the much less acceptable facets of my life’

“I wished to point out all of the type of messiness and the much less acceptable facets of my life,” she says. “Like, my sexual escapades and medicines and issues which are a part of me. And so they did not forestall me from being, you realize, that profitable, good, good woman they noticed on TV.”

There was additionally the trans group itself to contemplate, and she or he actually did.

“A factor that turned vital was for different trans folks and, particularly, different trans people who find themselves pre-transition, early of their transition or questioning themselves. It turned a thought in my thoughts of like, What are the issues I want anyone had informed me within the years main as much as my transition and simply after?” Schneider says. “And I’ve heard from a few trans folks that they did resonate with a bunch of [the book]. And that is actually vital to me… That is a selected group of individuals I actually hope it may possibly assist.”

Chapter titles embody “When Did You Know You Had been Trans?,” “OK Then, So What Have Your Experiences With Medication Been Like?,” “How Did You Lose Your Virginity?” and “What Did You Win on Jeopardy!?”

“It was an emotionally intense expertise, extra so than I type of anticipated,” Schneider says of writing it, “as a result of all of the stuff I talked about is type of stuff that I have been actually like pondering by means of the previous few years… So I did not anticipate writing all of it out to to be that as a result of I might been excited about it a lot.”

The writing was so emotionally taxing that it actually affected her temper, even when she wasn’t at her laptop computer.

And that is comprehensible. One of many extremely personal topics Schneider writes about is how, wanting again, she sees clues all through her life that she was trans, though she did not truly transition till her late 30s. There was the truth that in her first marriage to a lady, earlier than she had come out as transgender, she turned an avid cross-dresser, retaining it hidden from everybody. Then the longer term Jeopardy! champion’s spouse left her in 2016, and, within the aftermath, she went again to cross-dressing in personal frequently. Then at some point she realized that, if she died on the time, she can be buried in a go well with and tie.

“If I might solely put on one outfit for all of eternity,” Schneider writes, “I wanted it to be fairly.”

By 2017, Schneider made her transition. She married Genevieve Davis in Might 2022.

Struggling along with her physique picture

Schneider’s relationship along with her physique is one other subject that she writes about in heartbreaking element.

“I hated my physique, hated the way in which it regarded, the form it had, the feel of its pores and skin, every part,” she writes. “If I favored a woman, then how might I justify asking her to have a look at it or, God forbid, contact this droopy awkward mess I inhabited? Women deserved higher than me. They deserved somebody who knew easy methods to play by boy guidelines, somebody who might go a take a look at in the one topic I all the time failed.”

Schneider wrote that she felt her physique “might solely ever be a supply of disgrace and weak spot and embarrassment.”

In the present day, she feels in another way, however it’s sophisticated.

“It is a world higher. I imply, it is evening and day for probably the most half,” she says of her relationship along with her physique now. “It was all the time disgrace as a result of it was similar to, it regarded flawed and it had all this hair on it… after which I got here out, I went on hormones and, and did numerous issues to repair that dysphoria factor. And that made an enormous, enormous distinction.”

Fame has include its personal pressures.

“Being on TV and being a public determine and being, you realize, all of this stuff,” Schneider says, “then it was like this completely different type of nervousness about my physique and being judged otherwise, simply the identical approach that ladies are judged on the whole and fewer about my gender id.” 

On a a lot lighter observe, Schneider explains how she’s spent a few of her Jeopardy! winnings, which whole greater than $1.6 million: “Most likely the largest single buy was getting courtside tickets to a [Golden State] Warriors sport, which I by no means thought I might be capable to afford,” she says. “Past that, it has been smaller issues. My spouse and I actually like type of fancy eating… tasting menus and issues like that. So type of indulging in these issues a little bit bit.”

Additionally, she was in a position to give up her day job and cease worrying about making lease.

Within the Type of a Query is accessible Tuesday, Oct. 3 at bookstores.