LONDON (AFP) - David Palmer, a former member of the British seventies rock band Jethro Tull, has had a sex-change operation and is now recording music as a woman called "Dee", the former keyboard player said.
Palmer, a 66-year-old former soldier in the Royal Horse Guards, has swapped his trademark beard for long blonde hair and make-up after feeling urges to be a woman since the age of three.
"I want to be judged on my musical ability alone, and nothing else," Palmer told the Daily Mirror newspaper.
"It's not just wimps who want to do this. To be a girl, it goes a lot deeper than that," she said.
Ian Anderson, the band's lead singer, released a statement, saying he hoped fans would accept Dee as a woman.
"Like many other people who have known David for three decades as a bearded, pipe-smoking man's man, I found it difficult to understand at first," Anderson said.
"But I fully support his decision to undertake a new life as a woman," he said.
"The moment when the new Palmer identity was revealed to me was when the then, still David, phoned me to say 'Ian, there's something I need to get off my increasingly ample chest'," his statement added.
