The first flowers are female and make fruit. They are followed by male flowers which to not make fruit. It is my belief that male flowers are unique to each variety and can be used to identify an unknown banana, if you have a known good, properly identified pix to compare to. I have been taking pix of mine, as they bloom, but don't always know for certain that they were correctly IDed to begin with. Below is the male flower of Thousand Finger, which is pretty easy to ID from it's fruiting habit.

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What a fantastically beautiful photograph! Now, I was under the impression that the first flowers, which produce fruit are female: the next lot which are the same, but do not have baby bananas are neutral: and that the big lump on the end is the male flower. Have I got it wrong? Yesterday I saw some of the latter, sliced and preserved in a can and for sale in an oriental grocery store! Perhaps I should have it for dinner?

I'll get in trouble for the terminology, but - no, the big purple thing on the end is not the make flower. It takes one flower to make EACH banana. Each "petal" (not the right term, I know) of the purple bud opens up or lifts up to reveal a group of flowers, somewhere, on average, of about 15 in a group. Multiply that 15 by the number of purple "petals" and you get the total number of flowers. Out of the total number of flowers, maybe 3000 (?), maybe 50-200 are female, a few hermaphroditic, and the rest are male. Yes, the buds are eaten, and often cost about 5-10 bucks in the store. I give mine to my Cambodian neighbor.