It was asked without the care one would normally use when approaching such a topic and perhaps that reflects badly but I find the question interesting.
What if we are so controlled by the environment around us? Are our likes and dislikes something we have control over or is it just a result of the world around?
I absolutely think we a are controlled by the environment around us, and we're only properly starting to understand and measure this recently.
Unrelated, what do you think are the causes? Gene mutations in child? Womb environment disruption? Pollutants? Pathogens? God just deciding "I'm going to make this one trans"? Social pressures (wat)?
I agree that no topic is off limits in principle (and in fact I did not say that this topic should be off limits, contrary to what you suggest). However, some topics attract an overwhelming majority of bad faith participants in the discourse. I have already seen quite enough dispassionate debates on HN on the subject of what exactly is wrong with gay and trans people. I have no wish to fan the flames of another one.
It would be more interesting to debate the causes of heterosexuality. (It’s interesting, for example, that people tend to suggest ‘gene mutations’ as a possible cause for homosexuality but not for heterosexuality, even though any genes underlying human sexuality have presumably mutated many times over our evolutionary history.)
Well the cause of heterosexuality seems obvious enough. Making males want to fertilize females will cause babies which spreads the "make male want to fertilize female" mechanism creating genes. So a mutation that makes genes that cause such a feeling will spread.
It's a fairly direct linkage so one could see how genes causing it could reach fixation (and indeed, variations of this desire reached fixation hundreds of millions of years ago).
Conversely, genes that result in, say, mice being sexually attracted to cows wouldn't reach fixation, leading to them being very rare in the mouse population. So most animals will be most attracted to things that have the highest chance they can make healthy offspring with.
In fact, no-one knows what makes people straight, gay, or otherwise. So there is not much to talk about, from a purely scientific point of view.
But anyway, that was an aside. You haven't responded to the main point of either of my comments. If you really are only interested in having a debate about the causes of homosexuality, I'm not the person you're looking for (and the comments on this article aren't the place for it).
To a libertarian like me people should be allowed to do whatever they want with their bodies, including changing it as they wish or declining other people's attempts to change it (via a "cure"), but I understand this isn't universal.
To me, a discussion on whether homosexuality has a pathogenic trigger is intellectual curiosity, to someone else it's like a Jew overhearing a couple of bald rough looking fellows talking about how there are too many Jewish movie producers and someone should do something to make there be less of them...