Frequently used to close or mark the completion of a short lyric poem, the takhallus or penname also serves to point to the poet’s artistic talent, and to the poet’s role as a producer of public texts for recitation and/or performance. Since at least the fourteenth century CE, female poets writing in Persian (such as Jahan-Malik Khatun [d. after 1389]) have signed their compositions with their takhallus. Many pre-modern and early modern women poets of the Iranian world employed pennames that were unmistakably feminine, not only in terms of their semantic meaning, but also in terms of grammatical form. This paper will focus on three such poets active contemporaneously in Iran in the first half of the nineteenth century: Valiya Qajar, Mastura Kurdistani, and Tahira Qurrat al-‘Ayn. Through a detailed and comparative reading of their poetry it will be demonstrated that, not only did these Iranian poets (unlike a good number of their contemporaries or near contemporaries in Europe) refrain from hiding their gender, but rather they stressed it both through the ways in which they utilised their takhallus, and through bold celebrations of femininity such as those expressed in the fakhriya (short self-praise poem). The fact that these key women poets of the early Qajar period resisted the temptation to engage in literary transvestitism by hiding their gender in unisex pennames challenges the notion that it was not until the twentieth century that Iranian women demanded their gender be acknowledged by those who read their works.