Cognitive empathy is the ability to put oneself mentally in another person’s situation and try to understand how they might be feeling (as opposed to emotional empathy in which one experiences those emotions with another person and truly understanding how they feel).

Where I (also ASD Level 1) have long struggled is with emotional empathy. At age 15, I told my mom that I didn’t know if I loved her. I understand now that this was a symptom of my autism, that I didn’t understand a variety of emotions, apart from excitement about hyperfixation and annoyance at most of the rest of the world for moving and think so slowly relative to me.

And, yes, cognitive empathy was also lacking when I was younger. I did have difficulty imagining what other people’s life experiences were like, mainly because I was…well…young and inexperienced, not necessarily because I was autistic.

What I take issue with is the blanket statement that autistic people lack cognitive empathy because it is a sweeping generalization that doesn’t allow for nuance. The implication in your statement is that we’re born without it and never possess it, and that simply isn’t true. It isn’t difficult for autistic people can learn cognitive empathy and other sorts of emotional intelligence.