You can wear female armor as a male, it looks pretty goofy but hey whatever. At least I can...
Regarding the tourney, yeah don't get your hopes up for regular town tournies giving you too many items, the chance is something like 5% or so, I've gotten maybe 3 items and I'm well past the 50 tournaments won achieve, if you really want to get a nice bonus from tournies, go visit the Noldor city, and what you won't seem to find on these boards is that on the 1st of the month(every month)to the 4th of the month, the Noldor hold tournies. Each time you win you get a piece of armor/weapons or even a Qualis stone, it may depend on what day you go, I dunno about that part though. These are also considerably better than regular tourney items, obviously, my second one was a lordly noldor helmet with something like 62 head defence, second was a balanced runesword, third Qualis gem, etc. Regular tournies have given me one or two barclay armor pieces and some basic armor like a surcoat worth 2k or something, meh.
Also, it says you gain relation each time you win the tourney, but I never actually checked to see if that raises Noldor relations, it says your relations with the city increase but the city itself doesn't actually display it's attitude towards you, I just assume that the towns' affection for you is still there but not displayed like other towns, and with that assumption comes the guess that the Noldor shop is still influenced by the relations of the city, even though you may not be able to see it.
Anywho, I hope this helps you a bit, just remember to always have an inventory slot open when doing any tournies, missing out on some nice loot because of the games lack of an overfill window can be sad =(