There was an incident involving Shedinja nearly... man almost exactly two years ago to the month. Normally, they don't really appear in the wild but there was this...ginormous swarm of them and they kind of ended up stealing a lot of people's souls. But this doesn't happen with trainer-raised ones, for whatever reason and I already knew that. But the whole thing just still kind of left a bad taste in my mouth, I guess you could say?

That and I didn't particularly want a Ninjask. Bug types are okay and all but they don't really do it for me, so it felt kind of...dickish to catch a Nincada solely to have a Shedinja and then just be like "Oh well bye now dude, I just raised you so I could have your reanimated husk after you evolved! So long and thanks for the memories!"

[In comparison...this really seems like a non-issue.]

Really? This is literally the first time I have heard somebody say they had a pleasant experience with Whitney. But I guess it really shouldn't surprise me. Common interests and all, Gym Leaders obviously have their type biases. Something similar happened to me after I challenged Morty using only ghosts.