A fundamental part of the existing bibliography was produced by travestis themselves, as is the case of activist Lohana Berkins, whose articles, conferences, interviews and compilations are the pillar for the study of this community in Argentina. In recent years, there have been discussions regarding the so-called "travesti theory", a critical theory that proposes the construction of their own paradigm, epistemology and ontology, through which the established discourses can be disarticulated in order to produce new knowledge production modes on the travesti population, from a regional and decolonizing perspective. Peruvian scholar Malú Machuca Rose described travesti as "the refusal to be trans, the refusal to be woman, the refusal to be intelligible. (...) Travesti is classed and raced: it means you do not present femininely all of the time because you cannot afford to." According to Rizki, the "travesti theory" constitutes a "Latin/x American body of work and a body politics with an extensive transregional history", citing South American writers such as Berkins, Giuseppe Campuzano, Claudia Rodríguez and Marlene Wayar as exponents. He defined travesti as "a politics of refusal", as it "disavows coherence and is an always already racialized and classed geopolitical identification that gestures toward the inseparability of indigeneity, blackness, material precarity, sex work, HIV status, and uneven relationships to diverse state formations." According to scholar Dora Silva Santana, travesti is "a negation of an imposed dominant expectation of womanhood that centers on people who are cisgender, heteronormative, able-bodied, elitist, and white." Marlene Wayar's 2018 book Travesti / Una teoría lo suficientemente buena has been considered an important contribution to the field. Wayar explained:
