Jeopardy! champ Amy Schneider says lack of trans representation kept her in the closet far too long

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Trans Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider recently opened up about the critical need for trans representation in media and how a lack of it during her youth kept her in the closet well into adulthood.

In an emotional op-ed for the Dayton Daily News, the Ohio Native explored why it took her until she was 37 years old to realize she was trans.

Related: Trans Jeopardy! champ Amy Schneider shares romantic details of her recent engagement

“I couldn’t think of myself as trans because I didn’t know that was something a (normal) person could think!” she wrote.

Throughout her childhood, she said, she was exposed exclusively to negative portrayals of trans women.

Through movies like “The Silence of the Lambs,” she explained how she came to understand trans women as “mentally ill, dangerous, fantasists, not ‘really’ women but scary men with freakish impulses.”

“If trans women were like that, how could I possibly be one?” she asked.

And that, she said, is why “accurate, diverse, honest representation” is so important, and why she hopes…

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