We know that Governor Ron DeSantis has declared that Florida is where woke goes to die. Florida is now a solidly red state, thanks to the leadership of DeSantis so that tracks. Who would have thought that a deep blue state like Connecticut would follow suit?

Well, at least in one specific area, anyway. In this case, Connecticut is taking a page from newly-elected Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ playbook and banning the use of the term ‘Latinx’ in state documents. Some Democrat Hispanic state lawmakers have proposed legislation that bans the term in official government documents. The proposal calls the term offensive to Spanish speakers.

More of this, please. Latinx is a made-up term used by progressives. They did away with traditional labels of Latino and Latina and came up with Latinx as a gender-neutral alternative. It’s stupid and frankly, Hispanics are right to be offended. That’s not how people speak. One Puerto Rican lawmaker in Connecticut is speaking out and saying that he’s offended by the woke term.

But state Rep. Geraldo Reyes Jr. of Waterbury, the bill’s chief sponsor and one of five Hispanic Democrats who put their names on the legislation, said Latinx is not a Spanish word but is rather a “woke” term that is offensive to Connecticut’s large Puerto Rican population.

“I’m of Puerto Rican decent and I find it offensive,” he said.

Within hours of being sworn-in as Governor of Arkansas last month, Sarah Huckabee Sanders banned the term from her state’s formal documents. Reyes said his motivations may be different from those of Sanders but he thinks her decision was a good one. “The Spanish language, which is centuries old, defaults to Latino for everybody,” Reyes said. “It’s all-inclusive. They didn’t need to create a word, it already exists.”

The oldest Latino civil rights group in the U.S. was out in front of this idea in 2021. The League of United Latin American Citizens announced that it would no longer use the term Latinx. Not everyone agrees with the move, of course.

But Maia Gil’Adi, an assistant professor of “Latinx and Multiethnic Literature” at Boston University, said the word actually dates back to Latino and Latina youth and queer culture in the 1990s, with the “x” being a nod to many people’s indigenous roots.

“The word Latino is incredibly exclusionary, both for women and for non-gender conforming people,” she said. “And the term Latinx is really useful because of the way it challenges those conceptions.”

David Pharies, a Spanish language professor at the University of Florida, said another movement would replace the “o” and “a” in many Spanish nouns referring to people with an “e.” He said that is something that would be easier for Spanish-speakers to pronounce than the word Latinx.

“Latinx was clearly a solution that was proposed outside the Spanish-speaking world,” he said.

It is not clear how many times the term Latinx has been used in official state documents. One search on the state government’s portal returned 945 hits. Those included more than just documents, though. It included press releases, blogs, and reports. An attorney or the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities said it uses the term in any complaint it submits.

The bill is expected to get a hearing before the Democrat-controlled Legislature’s Government Administration and Elections Committee during the current session. Governor Ned Lamont, a Democrat, will follow the debate as the bill moves through the Legislature. Will he sign such a bill? How could he not? It’s proposed by Hispanic Democrats, which makes the proposal unique. When Sarah Huckabee Sanders did it, she was supposed to be appeasing her conservative base. That can’t be said in this case.