Do all aspies have trouble recognising facial expressions?

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Some people are good at reading Facial expressions; this is especially the truth in females. Female Aspies are a great example; they often excel far beyond their male counterparts as social implications are greater for females that lack interpersonal skills however they are still aspies and still confused about a number of things. Your enviroment; expsosure to others and other variables could explain why you are able to understand facial expressions. I am not terribly bad at everything; I can understand some facial expressions; I am very sensitive to vocal expressions; I can detect through voice if someone is upset, sad, happy; frustrated; keep in mind I have worked in customer service for a long time (yeah I know kinda crazy being an Aspie) and because of this constant exposure I have learned these things through repetition. We Aspies are very similar but there are numerous differences. Also to be diagnosed as any Aspie the DSM is much more clear; an inability to read faces is not something that would exclude from a diagnosis of Asperger's.

I'm pleased to have found this thread - I was about to ask the same thing.
I am actually very good at interpreting facial expressions, body language and especially voice intonations.
According to online tests I am actually a lot better at that than the average person.

I am still on a waiting list for an assessment, and I am starting to think that maybe I shouldn't go through with it...

Not all of them are bad at reading body/facial language. I'm pretty good at it, and I know a couple of others I know on the spectrum who are able to do so as well. You don't need to have every symptom of AS to have AS.

I'm terrible at reading facial expressions. I can tell something basic like if they're smiling or frowning but I'm usually not able to discern what about unless someone just cracked a joke or something else obvious. When we're watching TV, my partner will tell me all this underlying stuff going on she picks up from the characters facial expressions or body language and I'm totally clueless.

Out of curiosity I've taken quite a few online tests and most of the time it turned out I was better than the average male (NT or AS). I scored about as good as the average female. Looking at the results even the ones I got wrong had more to do with a vocabulary nuance misunderstanding than not reading the emotion. I'm very introverted and hardly social so I doubt it's anything consciously learned.

My recognition of discerning facial expressions is extremely limited, I can only interpret universal ones that NT's signify like "happiness," "joy," "sadness," "anger," and "disgust." Likewise, I immensely struggle with other forms of nonverbal communication like paralinguistics, gestures, and body posture. Learning and analyzing the verbal facts of nonverbal communication in Social Psychology is much easier, whereas trying to initiate NVC myself is exceedingly more complex than the ability to solve an advanced arithmetic calculation in my mind.
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Diagnosed with "Classical" Asperger's syndrome in 1998 (Clinical psychologist).
Alexithymia Questionnaire Score: 158/185
Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised (RAADS-R): 231/240
Aspie score: 186 out of 200
Neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 12 out of 200
AQ: 48/50 EQ: 9/80

The more I think about this, the more difficult this question is for me to answer. Initially, I would say yes! However, the more I think about it, the more I realize there were probably times where I haven't and wasn't aware of it. Whenever I have failed in reading a facial expression, people generally won't point it out because reading facial expression isn't always mandatory. If a person is upset and you don't pick up on it immediately, people will instinctively tell you how they feel in words. can always ask further questions to clarify a person's feeling and people will generally tell you how they feel if you don't respond to their feelings before hand. During the times I have failed to pick up on facial expression I most likely was not aware of it. So this kind of leads me to this question: How will I know if I correctly interpreted a facial expression if I don't know when I didn't? I'm only left with the times I do know when I have and those are times I could have been wrong too. It's easy to just say yes to something when you aren't aware of the no's.