South Bend LGBTQ leader Meghan Buell has died at 58
SOUTH BEND — Meghan Buell, the founder of a local nonprofit that aimed to improve transgender educational resources in smaller communities and save trans lives, died Tuesday. She was 58.
Buell’s death was announced by the executive board of the organization she founded in 2015, the nonprofit Transgender Resources, Education and Enrichment Services, or TREES. A cause of death hasn’t been shared.
“Meghan’s work has planted seeds of acceptance, celebration, and visibility for transgender people,” the statement reads. “These seeds will branch out farther than we will ever know.”
In 2022, Buell’s organization opened its first physical location in downtown South Bend, called The Tree House. The storefront space at 217 N. Main St. serves as a relaxed workspace for people to drop in and learn more about gender identity.
Before Buell’s death, TREES leaders shared that Tree House will close by the end of November, according to The Tribune’s reporting partner, WNDU.
In an oral history with University of Kentucky Libraries, Buell said she grew up in the steel town of Whiting, located about an hour’s drive west of South Bend. She went to college at Eastern Kentucky University.
Before Buell was 35, she said, she knew she wasn’t a “standard-issue guy.” From a young age, she felt more akin to her sister and girls in her classes.
In 2003, Buell came out as a transgender woman. She describes how her transition assuaged the simmering anxiety about her true identity that she had been reckoning with in private for years.
“The happiest moment in my life,” Buell said, “was the day I was able to stand up and say, ‘I am transgender,’ because it was at that point my life was not confusing, and I had focus and direction in it.”
She founded TREES in response to evidence showing transgender people are more likely to die by suicide or to face violence than the general population. A study this year out of Denmark found that people who identify as trans were 7.7 times more likely to attempt suicide and 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide.
Beyond her work with TREES, Buell gave guest lectures at colleges and worked as a substitute teacher in elementary schools. She wrote a memoir about her experience as a transgender woman called “The Road to Me: A Transgender Journey.”
In her leisure time, she was an avid golfer who had volunteered on the LPGA Tour.
A visitation and funeral service were planned for Friday afternoon at Saint Peter’s United Church of Christ in South Bend. Visit the TREES Facebook page for more information.