Season 38 champion Amy Schneider is welcoming Hannah Wilson into the Guild of “Jeopardy!” Champion Trans Women.
The Tournament of Champions winner is continuing to celebrate trans visibility on the game show as yet another trans contestant makes their mark on the Alex Trebek stage.
Will Amy Schneider Teach Hannah Wilson The Guild Of ‘Jeopardy!’ Champion Trans Women’s Secret Handshake?
Huge congratulations to Hannah Wilson!!! Welcome to the Guild of Jeopardy Champion Trans Women, one of us will be in contact shortly to explain the secret handshake and so forth
— Amy Schneider (@Jeopardamy) May 4, 2023
Hannah Wilson, a data scientist from Chicago, Illinois, won $24,000 on Wednesday after defeating 3-day champion Kevin Bell. The match caught the attention of “Jeopardy! Masters” contestant Amy Schneider, who took to Twitter to congratulate her run.
“Huge congratulations to Hannah Wilson!!! Welcome to the Guild of Jeopardy Champion Trans Women, one of us will be in contact shortly to explain the secret handshake and so forth,” she tweeted on Thursday morning.
Love it!! pic.twitter.com/8NisL1sQlX
— Saint Glasses™️
(@HalfGlassSaint) May 4, 2023
Fans had nothing but love for both Amy and Hannah. “She was so great!” one fan commented. “She was a breath of fresh air after so many dull games,” another follower wrote. “I love her,” a third fan chimed in.
“You’re so hilarious. Yay for trans visibility,” another follower commented. “I love that it’s a guild. The word, specifically, is a good one,” another fan teased. “She was so impressive! Can’t wait to see how long she reigns,” another follower added.
Amy has won a Queerty Award for trans representation and even wrote an op-ed in March 2022 describing the importance of trans visibility in entertainment.
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Amy Explains The Importance Of Trans Visibility In Moving Op-Ed
The “Jeopardy!” champion originally born in Dayton, Ohio, admitted that she was actually 37 before she realized that she was trans and started her transition.
“How could I live so much of my life being unaware of one of the most fundamental things about me?” she asked herself, noting that there were “signs” early on. “As early as first grade, I formed friendships with girls more easily than with boys,” she wrote. “I always played as Princess Peach when I could, and loved ‘being’ Lara Croft while playing Tomb Raider.”
During Amy’s first marriage, she opted not to have a best man. Instead, she asked a close female friend to be her “honor attendant.” However, during that time, she said that “the idea that I might be trans never crossed my mind.”
“But actually, it makes sense: I couldn’t think of myself as trans because I didn’t know that was something a (normal) person could think!” she wrote, adding that the 1991 thriller “The Silence of the Lambs” promoted a negative stereotype about trans women.
Amy saw the movie when she was 12 and noted that “for many people, myself included, it solidified the image of what trans women were: mentally ill, dangerous, fantasists, not ‘really’ women but scary men with freakish impulses that separated them from society and drove them to do terrible things.”
“The serial killer Buffalo Bill, dancing in the mirror wearing a suit made from human skin, was the farthest possible thing from a positive role model,” she explained. “If trans women were like that, how could I possibly be one? And that was far from the only example.”
This is why, she explains, representation is so important, and something that she hopes that people will understand when they look back on her iconic “Jeopardy!” win streak of 40 games.
“Representation — accurate, diverse, honest representation — is incredibly important for everyone, but especially for those people in the LGBTQ community,” she continued. “As a trans woman, you could even say I was lucky in some ways. However distorted their image was, the existence of trans women was at least acknowledged in the society I grew up in. Had I been a trans man, or nonbinary, I wouldn’t have known that there was anyone like me at all.”
“Learning that I’d been wrong, that I wasn’t flawed, wasn’t broken, but a perfectly normal trans woman like many others, is one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to me. But it couldn’t happen until I saw other people like me, until I realized that there was a different category out there that I fit into,” she continued.
“And so my hope is that my ‘Jeopardy!’ run has shown some people, who might not have known otherwise, that being trans isn’t a myth, an illness, a perversion or a problem to be solved,” she concluded. “Trans is just a thing that some people are, and those people are just like anybody else, and can do anything they want to do. Even become a champion!”
