The number of murders of transgender people in the United States hit a record high this year, activists said on Friday, amid outcry over rising violence in the transgender community.

Twenty-two transgender or gender non-conforming people have been murdered so far in 2015, nearly twice the number for last year when there were 12 reported killings, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP).

The toll marks “a state of emergency for our communities”, said Chai Jindasurat, a spokesman for the New York-based advocacy group, which has been tracking LGBTQ violence since 1999.

Among the victims was Penny Proud, a black transgender woman who was gunned down in New Orleans in February, prompting what activists said was the first youth-led transgender march in the city.

“Having things hit so close to home kind of puts you in a state of fire,” said Ja’Leah Shavers, 21, an organiser at BreakOUT!, an LGBTQ youth group in New Orleans.

“Overall the epidemic that is happening in the country right now absolutely has fueled us being louder and being more visible.”

The violence could be tied to growing attention toward transgender people such as the recent coming out of Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner, said Kevin Nadal, head of the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

“In general if you look at history a lot of times, whenever there are positive moves for historically marginalised groups there tends to be a backlash,” he said.

Community activists and organizers agree.

Alok Vaid-Menon, an organizer with the Audre Lorde Project, told the Guardian that the presence of transgender and gender nonconforming people in the media has lead to greater outrage over their existence in society at large, and has also increased the pressure for others to come out as trans when it may not be safe for them to do so.

“What feels uniquely dangerous about this moment is the moral hierarchy that’s being established where trans and gender non-conforming people have to be ‘visible’ in order to be legitimate,” Vaid-Menon said of the pressure to come out as transgender for those most at risk. “Even though increased visibility for the most vulnerable among us results in incredible violence.”

According to the recently released report on intimate-partner violence by the NCAVP, transgender and gender non-conforming people are almost twiceas likely to face violence from a partner in public compared to the rest of the LGBT community.

This has been the case with several murder victims this year – most recently Zella Ziona, who was killed in a Washington DC suburb last month. Police are investigating the suspect’s personal relationship with Ziona as the motive for her brutal killing.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called violence against transgender women of colour a “national crisis” last month. All but three victims tallied by the NCAVP were women of colour.

This week, voters in Houston, the fourth most populous US city, rejected a measure that would have banned discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, following a campaign by opponents focusing on the use of public bathrooms by transgender men and women.