Oakland resident Amy Schneider continued her historic Jeopardy! run on Wednesday, securing her 11th consecutive victory and $421,200 in prize money – the seventh highest winnings by a contestant in the show's regular season history.
She also became the first transgender contestant to qualify for the show's Tournament of Champions - a yearly competition featuring the 15 best players from Jeopardy’s previous season.
Schneider, originally from Dayton, Ohio, is currently an engineering manager in Oakland.
She told KGO she's been a fan of the long-running game show her whole life and she tried out three times before finally being selected. Schneider made her debut on November 17 and has not lost since. While she is not the first transgender contestant in the show's history, she has made it the farthest.
After wearing a transgender flag pin during the Nov. 26 episode, she explained on Twitter both the reason for the gesture, and what being transgender means to her.
"The fact is, I don't actually think about being trans all that often, and so when appearing on national television, I wanted to represent that part of my identity accurately: as important, but also relatively minor," she wrote in part of the thread.
She added that she also wore the pin specifically because the episode aired during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, which "can be hard for anybody who has been ostracized or otherwise cut off from their family, a group which, sadly, still includes a disproportionately high number of trans people, especially trans youth and trans people of color." She wanted to show "her membership in, and support of" a "community that might be having a hard time right now."
Schneider asked people to donate to organizations that help LGBTQ people in need this holiday season, such as Translifeline and the Transgender Law Center.
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