Same as maven, except that just passing -D only impacts the gradle process, but not the forked daemon workers. This is how you are supposed to do it:
From Configuring the Build Environment
You can also set system properties in the gradle.properties file. If a property name in such a file has the prefix “systemProp.”, like “systemProp.propName”, then the property and its value will be set as a system property, without the prefix. In a multi project build, “systemProp.” properties set in any project except the root will be ignored. That is, only the root project’s gradle.properties file will be checked for properties that begin with the “systemProp.” prefix.