I’ve seen the “white knighting” thing in videos, but in my small amount of personal experience people are actually pretty good at sorting out and agreeing on who is the primary aggressor regardless of gender. Maybe the “man is always wrong” reaction is an anecdotal thing that gets blown up to a more common occurrence than it actually is, or maybe it’s a factor of crowd size and people jumping in from far away with no idea of the context.

What really sucks is getting attacked by a woman as a man. There is absolutely no good answer, it’s just a bad place to be stuck in.