The pain the author is expressing is very real, and the breakup of relationships around a mate transitioning does have some elements of death, as the end of any relationship does. While obviously a transgender person is not dead, and it is beyond a certain point a really bad comparison, there also is going to be a period of grieving as a person changes, it is part of the psychology of dealing with change, the denial, anger, compromise, etc, but the end is not the same (though angry spouses, the ones who cut the kids off from the transitioning spouse, do make it into death, at least to them, it is that vicious).
It is also true that up until recently, there has been very little support for the partners of transgender people, the support groups out there mostly have been for transgender people and there still is relatively little for the spouses, even therapists who work with trans folks seem to be stymied in that regards IME (and I hope there is more help out there for mates these days, I know more are finding ways to stay together as mates, not as sisters or aunts or whatever…). It is very hard on the mate, especially where it is a M to F married to a woman. Even in this day and age a lot of women take something out of being married , being “Mrs so and so”, and then there is the identity issue, women are a lot more fluid then men sexually, but there is still the stigma of being seen as gay, or going from being an ‘ordinary’ couple to being a ‘lesbian couple’ (the book “My Husband Betty” and its follow on has some pretty good descriptions of the feelings). A lot of women might otherwise be okay, but they are afraid of how others will react, family, friends, and it is too much. Worse, people and groups who might be very supportive of a trans person who has lost their mate, is broken up over their family splitting up, will treat someone who is transitioning and trying to keep their family together like a leper, it is almost like there is a script for this kind of thing, and the spouse can get treated even worse, like “how can you stay with X, she is going to be a woman”, either in the context of “you’ll just be a boat anchor on her” or “you can’t stay together, she is becoming a woman, what kind of idiot are you, it can’t work”. I think if we didn’t have the stigma of being different, with all the baggage around sex and sexual identity (hopefully with same sex marriage now legal and most people starting to see that being gay or lesbian or hopefully trans as something human and not dirty, that this will change, but i am not holding my breath), that a lot more might be able to make it.
One of the things that gets me mad about articles like this is the concept that the transitioning person “lied” to their spouse, somehow cheated them, etc. First of all, not all trans people know from the time they were little they were trans, things get buried, there are plenty of ‘men’s men’ out there who go through life, have a family, then something hits later on and it just doesn’t click. With Caitlyn, it is another pattern, growing up in the time she did , there was no support, other than the (lurid) accounts of Christine Jorgensen, it wasn’t talked about, and the pressure if you were a boy was to excel and grow up and get married and to fill that model you squared your shoulders and sucked it in. They didn’t get married to hide what they were necessarily (some did, used it as a tool to ‘bury’ the demon), they genuinely fell in love with a woman, they wanted to have a family, and then later on things happen and they find themselves where they feel they have to transition or do something bad to themselves. There was dishonesty, but it was more to themselves than to the spouse, and transition is difficult enough without the blame game or the guilt crap, this isn’t someone who married a rich woman, stole her money then transitioning, this is someone who likely fell in love with a woman, wanted to make it work, tried, and then found the inner being was too much and they needed the freedom to be themselves. It isn’t a tale of victim or hero, it is the tale of a family dealing with something hard to deal with, and both partners and the family deserve support and understanding. It might make the grieving spouse feel better to be looked at as a victim, but in the end that helps neither person IMO.
It is funny, the other place where spouses break up over transition tends to be where you have two men and one decides to transition, it is as bad or worse then men transitioning in a hetero relationship. With women the two people often stay together after transition it seems, which is interesting, there seems to be a lot less issues around that IME.