I'm looking at separating male and female armors in the CK, so when the player loots a body the armor doesn't magically change six from male to female or vice versa. I'd like male armors to remain male, and female armors to remain female.

At first sight it would seem pretty simple (albeit time-consuming) to achieve this - for example, taking the standard iron armor, I could duplicate it, rename one as "Iron Armor - Male" and the other as "Iron Armor - Female" and remove the male and female world models from either respectively (presumably I'd also need to do this for the armor addon "IronCuirassAA"?)

But then I realise there may be some visual issues, as doing it this way doesn't actually prevent NPCs from equipping the armor via lists, but they would have a 50/50 chance of wearing either male or female.

I don't think it matters if female NPCs wear male armor (I don't have anything against "boob plate" armor, but think females wearing male armor won't look too bad or out of place). What I don't really want is butch male NPCs walking around in female boob armor, as I think that may be slightly immersion-breaking.

There's also the issue of all hand-placed items having to be manually edited (so it makes sense in that particular location), split 50/50.

Daedric armor can magically change to fit the six, I'm fine with that - but other ancient artifacts (such as Deathbrand) pose another problem - I don't really want to break lore by changing the six of the original owner, but otherwise the vast majority of decent armor would end up being male. Maybe a way forward could be to allow the player to change the six at the forge via smithing?

Is it even possible to accomplish what I'm looking at, and if so - any easier way to do so, perhaps via scripting?