Delian said:
Solution?
create lore versions of the tags, such as
male_(lore), female_(lore), etc
so an image can have both female and male_(lore) tags on them at the same time.

This has been discussed so many times now and this particular solution has also been discussed in past as well and there are many reasons why this will not happen, starting from that because at that point they would be actual tags, meaning that staff would need to enforce them.

Meanwhile descriptions and sets are almost free game.

Also as mentioned, description nuking is far less severe action than actual tag nuking. If you want to make this system even more bulletproof, you could easily link the tags in description to dedicated set search, sets being for specific tags. This would also make it easy to cross-check if posts included in set contains tags in the description.