Jeopardy! champ Amy Schneider talks about engagement
The historic Jeopardy! contestant also spoke about overcoming adversity and how attitudes toward trans people have changed.
Former Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider shared details about her recent engagement and reflected on the support she received during her 40-game win streak, which made her the second-winningest contestant in terms of consecutive victories behind current part-time show host Ken Jennings.
Schneider, a computer scientist and Dayton, Ohio, native who has since settled in Oakland, California, won $1,382,800 during her time on the show, amassing the most money and most consecutive wins of any woman in the show’s history. She is also the first transgender person to qualify for Jeopardy‘s Tournament of Champions, to be held in the fall.
Since the episodes — filmed months in advance — started airing, Schneider has found herself thrust into the spotlight, earning praise for her performances and knowledge but also criticism from anti-transgender forces upset over her identity. Last month, she announced her engagement to girlfriend-turned-fiancée Genevieve Davis via Instagram.
Speaking to San Francisco-based ABC affiliate KGO-TV, Schneider shared details of how Davis — whom she first met in 2020 but only began dating last February during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — proposed to her.
“I knew she was going to propose sometime in February,” Schneider said. “It’s Valentine’s Day then, and it’s actually [the] anniversary of when we started dating, and I thought it might be one of those days. And she had just like suggested this friends of ours, ‘Hey, want to come back, hang out, have a happy hour at our place?’ And I was like, ‘I’ve got a lot going on.’ I didn’t really think anything of it.”
Schneider at one point left the room, and when she returned, found Davis on one knee, proposing.
“Her friends had brought balloons they had hidden, and one of them was filming it, and it completely shocked me in the moment. And I said yes.”
On the Instagram post announcing her engagement, Schneider told Davis she wanted to propose to her as well.
“I couldn’t be happier or more proud to be marrying the very best person in the entire world, and I’m so glad to be sharing my life with her,” Schneider wrote at the time. “It’s great to be able to introduce her to people as ‘Genevieve, my fiancée.'”
Reflecting on her Jeopardy! run and the recognition she received from being on national TVs night after night, Schneider said the amount of positive feedback she received from viewers made it easier to ignore the negative feedback.
“Ultimately, what my goal was — and I did reasonably well at it — was essentially to ignore the haters, if you will, because having so much more positive feedback than I expected made me realize that [although] things are scary right now — like for trans people, there’s been a lot of legislation being passed or considered and this sort of thing — the fact is that we’ve kind of won,” she said, referring to transgender visibility and general acceptance by wider society.
“Once people start supporting LGBTQ equality, they don’t go back,” she continued. “And this [negative feedback] is kind of the last gasp of the people that are trying to hold us down. I really feel strongly that we’re kind of in the home stretch of this fight. Obviously, it’s not done. But I feel like that these [anti-trans sentiments] are just the last gasps of a movement, and that made it a lot easier to just ignore them.”
Schneider also reflected on how attitudes toward transgender people have changed since she was younger.
“I remember…my dad telling jokes about trans people. And I don’t even fault him for that because that’s all that there was about trans people. He was just quoting things he saw on TV and in the movies, jokes that made him laugh. And it’s really hard to see yourself as a joke. So I’m really glad to show people — who may not have seen otherwise — that trans people are just people, and they’re not that funny.”
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