Identifying as genderqueer is an opportunity to self-invent, unburdened from social expectations about dress and behavior. Occasionally Gieselman wishes for a lower voice and flatter chest, but other times feels O.K. with, even happy about, having a feminine physique.

“Even within the same day or the next day I can suddenly really love how my chest looks in a sundress,” said Gieselman, who wears two small nose rings. In the bedroom closet hang T-shirts, flannels, dresses and a rack of bow ties.

It might seem a simple turn of events, but adding gender-neutral options to the University of Vermont’s information system took nearly a decade of lobbying, the creation of a task force of students, faculty members and administrators, and six months and $80,000 in staff time to create a software patch.

One key to the developments is Dorothea Brauer, a plain-spoken, big-hearted mental health counselor known to everyone as Dot. Ms. Brauer spent nine years working at the campus counseling center before becoming, in 2001, the director of what was then called the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning & Ally Center.

While in her 20s and living in New Jersey, Ms. Brauer, who wears her hair cut short with a single, long braid down her back in tribute to a Cherokee grandmother, was spending time with a woman when an acquaintance changed the course of her life by inquiring about the relationship, and then pointedly but nonjudgmentally asking, “Honey, are you gay?”

“I said, ‘Well, yeah, but only with Anita,’ ” recalled Ms. Brauer. (Anita would turn out to be her life partner — 32 years and counting.) “That’s how clueless I was,” she said, chuckling over a taco salad lunch at the Penny Cluse Café in downtown Burlington. “I was 24, 25, and scared to death. I came out to my mother, only my mother, because I became physically ill with depression.”

A decade later, as one of the few out women on campus in the 1990s, she treated students with debilitating identity issues, some of whom attempted suicide or faced a psychotic break. (L.G.B.T.Q. youth are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as their heterosexual peers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) Ms. Brauer’s first act upon being installed as the center’s director was to assign a graduate student to research and catalog the unmet needs of the transgender community.