The report documented 21 homicides so far in 2015 – and none prosecuted as hate crimes – leading members of Congress to set first-ever forum on the issue

The number of transgender homicide victims in the US has hit a historic high, according to a new report from advocates, leading members of Congress to officially respond to an emerging pattern of tragedy with the first-ever forum on transgender violence.

The Human Rights Campaign report documented 21 transgender homicide victims so far in 2015, almost all of them transgender women of color, and likely an underestimate due to the difficulty of tracking the homicides. Among all 53 transgender murders from 2013 to 2015, not a single one was prosecuted or reported as a hate crime, the report found.

“There are now more transgender homicide victims in 2015 than in any other year that advocates have recorded,” said HRC president Chad Griffin in a statement.

On Tuesday 17 November, members of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus will hold the first forum on transgender violence to hear testimony from survivors, service providers, and policy experts. Before the forum, the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus will be announcing the formation of a Transgender Equality task force.

“The goal is to get a comprehensive view of the epidemic of violence against transgender people, the causes and effects of the violence, and what the federal government can do,” said Roddy Flynn, the executive director of the LGBT Congressional Equality Caucus organizing the forum. “The task force will analyze the current state of transgender equality and then determine the best ways for the federal government to act – whether it’s legislation, pushing executive agencies to act or advocating on the state level.”

Ahead of this meeting, HRC released its report finding that its count of transgender homicide victims is almost double what it was in 2014, likely on account of better tracking. The report calls for even better reporting of the violence transgender and gender nonconforming people face in the US on a federal level.

Last December, the FBI included gender identity for the first time as a form of bias in its annual hate-crime statistics – and found only 33 such hate crimes based on gender identity. Many states don’t have hate crime laws that include gender identity. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found 1,359 anti-LGBT incidents in its 2014 report using its broader definition of hate violence, which cites press, police and community reports.

“[The] lack of accurate and reliable data collection makes it impossible for advocates to know how widespread this violence really is,” the HRC report said.

The report finds that of those known victims between 2013 and 2015, the average age was 31 years old. At least 34% may have been engaged in sex or survival work at the time of their deaths, and more than twice as many people were killed in the south-east as in any other region of the country.

The report lays out the social and institutional factors that likely contributed to this violence, based on in-house and data from the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS). It argues that even though this community is more visible than ever, this visibility hasn’t solved barriers the community disproportionately faces such as the extreme poverty, job discrimination, and police harassment, all of which likely contribute to the disproportionate violence against this group.

“At a time when transgender people are finally gaining visibility and activists are forcing our country to confront systemic violence against people of color, transgender women of color are facing an epidemic of violence that occurs at the intersections of racism, sexism and transphobia – issues that advocates can no longer afford to address separately,” said Griffin.

The Congressional transgender task force will be chaired by Representative Mike Honda and will include Representatives Bonnie Watson Coleman, Chris Van Hollen, Joseph Kennedy, Raul Grijalva, Mike Quigley and delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. Groups like HRC, TPOCC and the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs have confirmed to the Guardian that they will be attendance on Tuesday.

While these groups have long histories of working directly with LGBT communities to end violence, they are hoping that this historic forum will be a call for non-LGBT people to step up and help stop the violence.

“The LGBT community has long counted on our non-LGBT allies to stand beside us in the fight for equality,” Kylar W Broadus, executive director of TPOCC said in a statement. “And right now, the transgender community needs allies more than ever as we fight for our very survival.”