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"Jeopardy!" champion and author of upcoming memoir "In the Form of a Question" (Avid Reader Press, 251 pp.) out Tuesday.
Who is: Amy Schneider?
That is correct!
Schneider – the millionaire who set our screens ablaze with her smarts last year –wrote a memoir that focuses less on her being the most successful woman to compete on the show and more on, well, everything else: her wife, Genevieve, coming out as transgender, losing her virginity, polyamory, to name a few.
Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist
She's also far less interested in simple "yes" and "no" answers than her quiz show history might have you believe – particularly, nuances in gender and sexuality and how coming out helped her discover new thought-provoking parts of herself.
"A lot of trans stuff, there's this sort of simplified way of describing it that is out there that gets at the most fundamental important things about why, we're real and we exist," she says over a Zoom call from Oakland, California. "But in fact, it's not actually all that simple. Once you get past that, things are a lot more complicated and weird and interesting."
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Question: It was fun to read that you were a theater kid. Do you act at all now? Would you ever do it again?
Answer: I definitely would do it again. I haven't been in an actual play for years now, largely because of the time commitment. But I do continuously perform. I do stand-up, which is a much lower commitment form of performing. And then obviously, since I've been on "Jeopardy!" I do speaking things, I appear on podcasts, and that scratches that itch.
As queer people, people always ask us when we "knew" we were queer, and I really appreciated your section on that, including dressing up as Thisbe (Francis Flute's cross-dressing role in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"). Have you revisited that since, or do you think of it differently now?
It is something I think about. A friend of mine that I've actually done some plays with was writing up a production in Louisville of it and caused me to think about it. The whole thing about Shakespeare is that you can keep coming back to everything and there's always a different angle and a different approach. In this case, he was talking about a production of which they'd altered a line so that Francis Flute wasn't objecting to playing a woman. And I had the reaction that was like, "Well, you don't even need to take that line out." Because that's how I was playing it, that he was saying that, because that's what he had to say, but it doesn't mean that he didn't really want to.
The book was refreshingly no holds barred in terms of talking about drugs and sex. How did you decide which scenes you really wanted to tell and which ones you didn't?
There was this part of me when I was writing about some of those things that people generally wouldn't, that it's like: Why are you doing this? And I didn't really have an answer for myself. It just felt like the thing to do. I really like writing and want to keep doing it. And I want (it) to be a good book and to tell a good story and an interesting story and tell things that were worth reading about and not just be a celebrity memoir type thing. If it was just going to be all the stuff that was boring, then what good would it do me in that sense. But a lot of it was also about just being uncomfortable with being the face of trans people. And being the nice smart "Jeopardy!" lady. The fear of being used as a weapon to bring down other people who didn't live up to the clean image that I had. And so just wanting to show that like: "No, there's a lot of other parts to me, too. There's a lot of parts of everybody."
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You use your platform to talk about trans issues. Do trans fans of yours reach out frequently?
They do. It's all love, we're all very (supportive) of each other. I definitely feel like I've pulled back from political engagement in the last six months. In a way that I feel some kind of lingering guilt about that, and I wish I was being more active in that way. But it's hard, and it's depressing. Things aren't going our way at the moment, and to have the mental resources to pull yourself into a fight (that) currently feels like you're losing a bunch of battles is just hard. I haven't been able to bring myself to do it.
How do you think media in general could better cover the trans community?
To an extent, I'm just like, cover us less. All that's been happening is that awareness has gotten around that some people are not comfortable with the gender they were born into, and that there are various social and medical and whatever interventions that can make those people's lives easier. And just let those people and their families and their doctors do their thing and have an easy life. There's no news here. The thing about all of it is is that trans people aren't actually asking for almost anything. In the same way that everybody gets to choose their own name, in the same way that you get to choose whether you go by David or Dave, we would also like to choose the name we go by, and ideally, the associated pronouns. And we would also like to be able to talk with our doctors about how we want our bodies to feel. And that's it. That's all there is to it.
The part you really illustrated well in the book, too, is just about bathrooms. You just want to go to the bathroom.
I understand, you know, again, I grew up not getting it. I grew up transphobic like everybody else. I understand not getting it. But once the light goes off, it's like, oh, OK, there's nothing to this.
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