Transparency issues with custom shader

I've looked around and messed with shader options, but I can't seem to find an answer / the answer may be I can't because of the way writing to the ZBuffer works. Before I give up, I just wanted to ask, is there some way to achieve the effect shown in the Transparent shader and depth writes section on that unity docs page but ONLY on a per object basis? I'm having some issues when, say, an arm of object1 is in front of object2 - object2 being technically still closer to the camera as a whole. It will cause me to see nothing of object2 behind the arm of object1 even though the arm is translucent.

I don't want to split models into parts since they'll be animated and I feel like that could be a nightmare - I think I'd rather take the occasional render error due to interlocking models, but if anyone has a solution to my problem, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks!